Kingston is not unlike a college Eddington in how it attempts to be an uncomfortably honest look at all sides of the Ivy League experience. Set in the dorm walls of Kingston College, a fictitious elite institution, Carlos Key and Kalijah Rowe’s feature debut follows three storylines of college life exploring how race, class and relationships impact the college experience.
Kingston College is a transparent analogue for Columbia University: Carlos Key, who co-directed the film with Kalijah Rowe, is a Columbia alumnus, and characters in the film mention rivalries to Yale and Princeton. Kingston wasx also filmed on Columbia grounds, leveraging the historic campus to give the film a grandiose feel beyond its micro-budget production. The film, which had its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival, follows an A-B-C plot structure, following three different types of students studying at a prestigious, predominantly white institution.
Atlas (Rose Badiru), a low-income, first-generation Black freshman, who decides to major in philosophy but is disappointed to find that almost everyone in her humanities course is studying economics . While trying to find her place on campus, she experiences everything from microaggressions to overt bigotry from classmates, the student paper, and college admin, which causes her to be increasingly disillusioned with her prestigious dream school.
Cyrus (Key), a junior with generational legacy whose father is a top donor to the college, and who has failed Chinese class twice in previous semesters, putting him at risk of being unable to graduate. The Chinese language department tasks Professor Liu (Michael C. Liu), a longstanding professor looking for a challenge, to set up one-on-one lessons with Cyrus and to teach the unteachable — the professor soon learns that traditional teaching methods are out the window with a student not motivated by success, grades, or even the possibility of failing.
Atlas and Cyrus are diametrically opposed in terms of class, race, and college legacy, and both in the same required humanities class, which eventually leads to their storylines overlapping. Kingston makes the interesting case that both are pushed towards determinism within the college: Amber realizes that despite overcoming many structural barriers to attend Kingston as a first-gen, low-income student, she still has to face racism and classism on a micro level everyday, which prevents her from participating in class or extracurricular activities. Meanwhile, Cyrus has learned that his family’s wealth means his failures will never have real consequences, so this and his excessive pride prevents him from making an effort in class. While the film draws these thematic parallels, it never equates the two or sees their concerns as equally valid — Amber is mostly the film’s empathetic point of view, whereas Cyrus is almost totally dislikable.
The third plotline follows sophomores Amber (Leann Gardner) and Marco (Nick Snipes), who have been seeing each other since the end of last semester but are in an ambiguous what-are-we state. Marco’s friends dog him into not committing to a relationship, which leads to Amber ending things between them, and they create separate dating profiles, to experience the highs and lows (it’s mostly lows) of college dating with awkward first dates, random hookups, and consulting their friends for unqualified advice.
Whereas Atlas and Cyrus represent disillusionment in the academic world, Amber and Marco are disillusioned with dating culture. Their plotline, however, barely interacts with the first two, and seems to exist on an oasis outside of the more consequential A-B plot. There are funny moments, such as a scene where Amber and Marco are both separately consulting their friend groups about what to do with the other, and since all their friends are econ students, they draw elaborate charts and graphs to explain why Amber should wait for Marco to make the first move or why Marco should date around before settling. However, once the two characters are separately dating, the plotline becomes a somewhat cyclical sequence of dates where the idea of “commitment” is examined ad nauseum.
Kingston attempts to tackle the entirety of the current moment, with references to dating app culture and artificial intelligence, and even includes real footage from Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protests and encampments in 2023. The film’s brutal honesty extends to its humor, and it lands a good amount of jokes about the college experience, from the intricacies of dorm-room parties to the types of conversations that occur in first-year classes. Its success can directly be attributed to the young age of its filmmakers, and its bravery to tackle issues specific to the 2020s is its greatest strength.
Our team is on site for the 25th Tribeca Film Festival, from June 3 to 14, 2026.
