The Infectious Enthusiasm of <i>Breaking the Bee</i>
An absorbing documentary spotlights four young Indian American spellers trying to make their way through a competitive field.
If you tuned in to the finals of last year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, broadcast in prime time on ESPN, you would have seen 15 young students remaining in the competition—and 13 of them were Indian American.
And at the end of 36 grueling rounds, Ananya Vinay, a sixth-grade girl from Fresno, California, won it all, continuing the 10-year streak of Indian American champions. Since 1999, when Nupur Lala won the Bee with a performance captured in the documentary Spellbound, Indian Americans have been victorious in all but four years.
How have kids of Indian descent managed to dominate the National Spelling Bee so thoroughly? That’s a question tackled by an enlightening new documentary, , which has its New York that!”
