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As the clock ticks and a cooking competition is coming to a close, a small figure wraps her hands together and paces in circles nervously. “Where are our kids? All the others have their food down already,” she asks aloud, tinged with worry.

This is Wilma Stephenson, a culinary arts teacher at Frankford High School in Philadelphia, who has helped many of her inner city students get out of a dead-end life by winning college scholarships through cooking. Her reputation is that of a no-nonsense coach, scary and disliked by those who fail to meet her standards of discipline. Of course, the jumpy lady praying for her students is a far cry from the image of the so-called boot camp teacher, but what’s on display at that moment is the true compassionate side of Wilma Stephenson that you have to earn first to see.

Pressure Cooker depicts one school year in the struggle of underprivileged high school seniors to obtain a realistic and successful future, something they didn’t quite realize to be attainable before Mrs. Stephenson’s intensive program. Since its inception in 1999, Wilma Stephenson has grilled more than 50 Frankford kids into winning a staggering accumulated total of over $3 million in scholarships.

"The classroom is known in the school as a place that, you go there and she will help escort you to the next level," said Mark Becker, co-director and editor of the film, whom JPP spoke to alongside producer and co-director Jennifer Grausman on Friday in San Francisco.

The 99-minute documentary first introduces Mrs. Stephenson as the fireball, whose dedication to the success of her students means she has no tolerance for strays. She scolds, she yells, she intimidates, but she gets results; only several bleeps away from reminding us of a certain famous angry chef on the FOX network. That surface gruff gradually fades as Mrs. Stephenson opens herself up almost in a narrative fashion. Grausman and Becker relied more on the vérité approach to discreetly capture the activities in class rather than interviews. We see her only as the students mostly see her, as the reliable guardian at school.

Pressure Cooker trailer

“We had this idea that we were going to get to go home with Wilma and maybe go to the gym with her, and spend some time with her outside the classroom. That was quickly shot down,” Grausman said.

As the students grow not only used to but also closer to her as a surrogate mother, Mrs. Stephenson begins to reveal herself to them, not to the camera. Her main focus always on her students, she wouldn’t let any distractions get in their way—not even the filmmakers. At one point, Mrs. Stephenson kicked the crew out and told them not to come back for a couple of weeks. Becker remembered certain days when they would drive down to Philly not knowing if they would be able to get into her class.

“I got yelled at a whole bunch of times,” laughed Grausman. “I did it not take it as well as [the students] did.”

“I think she felt it should be a movie about the kids. We started to think about it on those terms and deciding we wanted to try to focus on three kids, to go a little deeper with them,” she added.

Those three kids are Erica, a cheerleader who at home plays mom to a blind sister; Dudley, a football star with dreams of opening his own restaurant; and Fatoumata, a recent African immigrant who waits after an unsupportive father, wishing for an escape. While all of Mrs. Stephenson’s students are exceptionally hardworking, achieving and have stories to tell, the three kids they’ve chosen represent the amazing motivation that drive these kids.

Fatoumata represents the hard luck of the draw and the diligence it takes to overcome it. She came to America not knowing a word of English, and in just 4 years, she’s not only fluent, but also has a 4.0 GPA. Erica and Dudley hit closer to home by being the stars of their grade, but knowing full well that they’re not something that can be relied on post-high school.

“That was inspiring for us,” Becker said without a hint of insincerity. “When somebody shows that kind of wherewithal and maturity, you forget any sort of social issue aspect of making documentaries. It becomes more human. People are humans, not ‘inner city kids’ or ‘kids from a working class neighborhood.’ They’re people and they surprise you in so many ways.”

It’s especially striking with Dudley, the all-state player whose passion is football and is very close to an athletic scholarship, yet has the wisdom to recognize the unpredictability of sports and pursues a more stable future in culinary.

The directors recounted a group interview with Dudley’s football team that didn’t make it into the film. It spelled out the motivation for their hard work and the reason for Wilma Stephenson to do what she does.

“All the football players talk about the other football players that graduated the year before or a couple of years before, and they’re still coming to the sidelines and watching games,” Becker said. “There’s a sense [of them thinking], ‘I don’t want to be that guy.’”

“It’s not the textbook ‘I’m trying to stay off the streets’ or ‘I don’t want to do drugs’ or whatever it is that people think kids from the city are dealing with. It’s really this fear of mediocrity. Fear of ‘I don’t want to work in K-Mart, I don’t want to be that football player that sits on the sidelines not knowing what to do with themselves.’ They’re ambitious and they want more out of life. And those are some serious stakes, especially when one isn't naturally able to afford the education that helps everybody else get a leg up.”

The goal of their hard work is C-CAP (Careers through Culinary Arts Program), a national nonprofit scholarship working with public schools across the country to reward underserved high school students with scholarships (find out more about C-CAP here).

While Pressure Cooker follows the path taken towards this goal, its main interest lies on the relationship built between Wilma Stephenson and her students throughout the year, and how a focused intent could literally change the course of their lives.

“It was clear to us that the kids, they are so not in the middle of a contest. This is like this crisis point in their lives,” Becker said, noting the difference between the film and the cooking competitions that populate television. “Somewhere early on—it was clear to us that cooking is just a small aspect of what the film was about.”

“It’s an amazing experience on a documentary to be shooting something that is uplifting, because that’s just so not what you’re used to.”

Pressure Cooker is playing right now at the Lumiere in San Francisco and the Shattuck in Berkeley. It also opened on Friday in Chicago, IL and Fort Collins, CO. It has previously opened this summer in New York, LA and other cities, including Philadelphia.