Legacy

• Directed by: Tod Lending
• Produced by: Tod Lending

Academy Award-nominated LEGACY is the unflinching chronicle of one family’s triumphant journey out of poverty and despair. Touchingly narrated by Nickcole Collins, a teenage girl wise beyond her years, the film follows the Collins family over five years as they slowly pull themselves out of the haze of poverty, drug addiction, and violence that plagues their public housing project in Chicago. Stereotype-busting and open-minded, LEGACY paints the American Dream in honest colors to rousing effect. Improbably, the senseless killing of 14-year-old Terrell, a straight-Astudent and role model for the neighborhood, spurs the family to seek a better life against impossible odds. Nickcole’s mother, a high school dropout, moves in fits and starts to find a meaningful job. Aunt Wanda, mother of Terrell and longtime crack addict, enrolls herself in a drug treatment program. Nickcole catapults herself out of the inner-city trap to a college degree and a comfortable life. It’s impossible not to cheer for these incredible real-life heroes as they cry and laugh, stumble and get back up again on their way to something better.  In LEGACY, award-winning filmmaker Tod Lending does that rarest of things—he gives voice to the voiceless. The result is a stirring, must-see film that is “inspirational in the best sense of the term” (Variety)