reform school

Abandoned by her mother, she was sent, in her teens, to the Ventura School for Girls, a brutal reform school from which she emerged with an education in crime.

Olsen: There’s a whole other element to the story where we’re meeting one of the boys as an adult having survived the reform school.

These included actual archival images from and about the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, the real-life “reform school” that inspired Colson’s novel and the film’s story.

The “Nickel Boys” filmmaker RaMell Ross won the night’s best director award for adapting the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel about two Black teenagers struggling to survive at an abusive reform school.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys follows the powerful friendship between two men navigating a brutal reform school together in Florida.