Above, watch the newly-released official trailer for the film Waiting For Supermanfrom Paramount Vantage.

The education documentary was directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also directed the 2006 global warming hit An Inconvenient Truth, and it’s been making waves ever since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it won the Audience Award in the Documentaries category.

Waiting For Superman examines the crisis of an unbalanced American public school system through five interlocking stories set in different cities across the country. The topic is a familiar one, and it’s no secret that the public education system in America is deeply flawed and desperately in need of improvement. The film aims to inspire action by illuminating the complexities at hand: the role of teachers’ unions, political roadblocks, the public school lottery process, and the extension of the crisis to every social class.

For Guggenheim, making the film was an intensely personal experience, as he struggles to reconcile his convictions about public schooling with its harsh realities. In the video above, watch the director explain the motivating force behind making his film. “I betray my own ideals every morning as I drive my kids past three public schools on the way to private school,” he says. “as a country we’ve betrayed these ideals, letting mediocrity and dysfunction prevail in this very important thing that is public schooling.”

Waiting For Superman comes to theaters this fall. We at Get Schooled have seen it, and we were blown away! The film is moving, powerful, and truly exposes the American education systems faults and dire need of reform.

Head to the official website and make a pledge to go see this film.