"The Tested" has been with me for sometime. Something has happened over the past decade to really make me take notice of a certain part of this city that I didn't know all that well.

Nine years ago I moved into Manhattan - Gramercy Park, to be more specific.. Gramercy, if you don't know, is one of the nicest areas in all of New York City. But something that I'm sure you don't know is that it houses one of the Top 12 Most Dangerous Schools in the entire city (according to the New York State Department of Education). This statistic, coupled with a horrifying incident involving a pregnant woman walking past the school who was bludgeoned by a stool thrown out of a 6th floor window, really got my interest.

It made me think about what causes someone to act so violently, or how terrifying it'd be to attend one of New York's toughest high schools. How do you learn? How do you progress? When I went to high school my biggest concern was having to get through "Beowulf" - these kids have to worry about getting stabbed!

I began to remember what it was like for me when I first started to frequent the city. I grew up in northern New Jersey - just a few miles from the George Washington Bridge - so I'm pretty familiar with the city. It wasn't until I attended New York University, though, that I would come into the city by myself. Around that time there had been a surge of gang activity in the city. Gang members would have to approach a stranger on the street or subway and slash their face with a knife - that was their initiation. And so for a good period of time I walked the streets of Greenwich Village with eyes in the back of my head.

This story is the culmination of my past experiences and research, combined with a composite of stories pulled from today's national headlines. It seems as though every year there's some giant news story about a black teen being gunned down by a police officer. How can one deal with such a thing? How do you go on when you've made such a horrific mistake? And how do you go on when your child was so wronged? How can Darralynn ever find it in her soul to forgive? How can Dre handle the injustice of what happened to his brother? That's part of what this film explores race, class, guilt, shame, anger, redemption, forgiveness. "The Tested" tells the story of how three lives are affected by a terrible tragedy, and how they cannot find closure without the other.

"The Tested" is a story about big themes like the injustice of poverty and the cycle of violence, and in order to delve into it properly we have to be willing to show the ugly side of humanity.. That's the only way to do it fairly. Therefore the story needs to speak for itself. But the most important thing with this film is to not judge any of the characters, for right or for wrong.