NMSA:
A Story About
A School's
Becoming
A Documentary By Potter Pictures
What is NMSA?
NMSA: The Story About a School’s Becoming is a featured documentary about a public arts high school that quietly rewrites what education can be. Set in Santa Fe, the film traces fifteen years in the life of the New Mexico School for the Arts, following dancers, musicians, actors, writers, and visual artists as they arrive from across the state and slowly transform a fragile experiment into a thriving creative community.
Told with an intimate, ensemble focus, the film moves between rehearsal rooms, classrooms, dorm life, and the often-invisible labor of founders, teachers, and families. Moments of fear and fatigue give way to unexpected courage: a first solo, a college acceptance, a student returning as a mentor.
What emerges is a portrait of public education as an act of collective authorship—hopeful, imperfect, and deeply human—where young people are not simply taught, but invited to invent the future they want to live in.
GENRE: FEATURE DOCUMENTARY
RUNTIME: 41:29
AUDIENCE: 15+ YOUNG ADULTS
Logline
When a band of relentless educators stakes a claim in Santa Fe’s high-desert light, “NMSA – A Story About a School’s Becoming” tracks the walk-and-talk from rebel blueprint to standing ovation, showing how one audacious public arts school turns raw teenage talent into fearless, full-throated humanity—and proves that in the real American frontier, imagination is the land grab that matters.
More About
The Story
NMSA – A Story About a School’s Becoming follows the New Mexico School for the Arts as it transforms from a bold idea into a living, high-stakes creative sanctuary where students risk everything on art. The film opens with “The Art of Becoming,” a Muse-voiced poem that sets the tone, then interweaves two timelines: the school’s scrappy founding, built through borrowed spaces, visionary persistence, and funding battles, and the present-day intensity of NMSA’s studios, classrooms, and hallways.
Through intimate moments of rehearsal, critique, failure, and “again,” the documentary shows education as ignition, students and teachers pushing the edge of what’s possible. Founders, faculty, and alumni appear not as “talking heads,” but as witnesses to what it costs to build a home for young artists, and what happens when it works.
The story builds to ArtSpring (the school’s major rite of passage), then expands outward to the unveiling of the new Residential Life building, and finally graduation, where the film’s central claim lands: this is where young artists step into the light. Set against Santa Fe’s beauty and cultural gravity, it resists promotional gloss and embraces contradiction, brilliance and burnout, solitude and community . . . becoming a cinematic love letter to creative education as transformation.
