Knights of the South Bronx is a 2005 TV film about a teacher who helps students at a tough inner-city school to succeed by teaching them to play chess. The movie is based on the true story of David MacEnulty who taught schoolchildren of the Bronx Community Elementary School 70 to play at competition level, eventually winning New York City and the New York State Chess Championships . The screenplay portrays whistle-blowing and a mid-life crisis that combine to remove Richard Mason from his old life. He becomes a substitute teacher and is assigned to a fourth-grade class in a South Bronx... school. In the class are students with parents who are drug addicts or in jail or just scrambling to pay the bills. Few of them see a purpose in school other than meeting society's requirements, and he struggles, mostly in vain, to reach them. Then a student whose father is in jail sees Mason in the park playing a simultaneous exhibition, and beating fourteen opponents at once. He asks to learn the game. One thing leads to another, and soon the entire class is interested in the game.
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| Release date: | December 6, 2005 |
| Directed by: | Allen Hughes, Albert Hughes |
| Rated: |  |
| Runtime: | 90 Minutes |
| Producer: | Diane Nabatoff |
| Screenplay by: | Jamal Joseph, Dianne Houston |