The Lethal Ladies of Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women knew that watching Step, opening Friday (August 18), would be difficult.

Amanda Lipitz’s new doc, after all, isn’t just a light look at their street-dance team, one that practises step, a wild hybrid of thunderous foot-stomping and hip-hop. The movie also tracks the most crucial year in the African-American girls’ lives, the one that would determine whether they got into college or university—their ticket to escape generations of poverty, making them the first in their families ever to get a higher education. But added to that enormous pressure at their specialized Baltimore charter school were the private challenges of home life, from the battles Blessin Giraldo’s single mother had with debilitating depression to Cori Grainger witnessing her family’s electricity getting cut off amid her studies.

“I definitely think it was hard to watch it the first time,” cops Tayla Solomon in a group interview with her costars over the phone from a press stop in Toronto. “We watched it all together as a group.”

“It wasn’t so much painful as uncomfortable, to see the scenes when Blessin didn’t have food inside her house, or when I didn’t have lights,” says Grainger, who’s shown as a studious type in the film, supported by a loving mother who was a teenager when she had her. “But I don’t want people to see me with pity.”

For Giraldo, a scene where a counsellor scolds her for missing 53 days of classes brought back a close call with falling out of school. “I was shocked about the scenes when she mentioned the exact amount of days I missed,” admits Giraldo. “But then Amanda helped portray me as a determined, creative person, a resilient person.

“For me, there’s inspiration in the film. I like to appreciate the progress I made since the film—I wouldn’t say I regret anything.”

Inspired is definitely the mood Lipitz is after with Step, but never at the expense of her subjects. “I really had two things I kept in my mind whenever I was lost or questioning,” she tells the Straight in a separate phone interview. “It was ‘What is the best for the girls?’ ”

It was that kind of empathy and devotion that gained Lipitz the trust she needed for an inside look at the girls’ lives. It helped that her mother founded the school; Lipitz, who’s also a Broadway producer, had been visiting the site and had been making short films there for years.

“We’re definitely a family. I’ve known them since they were 11 years old,” she says. “They knew my family, they knew my mom, they saw me have babies. I was around a lot when there weren’t cameras around.”

“She definitely had our trust,” Giraldo concurs. “She was always interested in being a mentor and helping us socially and academically. She genuinely cared about us. And we were also all excited about putting stepping on the map—there’s such a rich culture of where it comes from.”

When the riots over Freddie Gray, a young black man who died in police custody in Baltimore in 2015, broke out, Lipitz started seeing a larger importance for her film to her beleaguered hometown. The girls’ successes felt like an essential burst of positivity and progress amid chaos—a message of hope that’s now taken on even more significance in Trump’s America.

As for the young women, who have gone on to college and continued to do step, they hope by revealing some of the hardest moments in their lives that they can make a difference.

“I just want the audience to take away being courageous and resilient. You have to control what you can control. Sometimes things are out of your hands. Let yourself define what success is,” Giraldo says.

Adds Grainger: “Never cut yourself short—you never know what’s going to be possible. So often we talk ourselves out of our dreams.”