On their first day sixth grade, the students of Jose Urbina Lopez Elementary School in the Mexican border city of Matamoros find their new teacher rolling on the floor surrounded by overturned desks. They’re not desks, he exclaims. They’re lifeboats. So begins Christopher Zalla’s “Radical,” an inspirational based-on-a-true-story drama about an unconventional teacher named Sergio
The film tells the tale of Sergio Juarez Correa (Eugenio Derbez), a sixth-grade teacher at Jose Urbina Lopez Primary School in Matamoros, Mexico in 2011, where gangs employ and recruit school-age boys.