Save the Last Dance

Sara Johnson dreams of becoming a professional ballerina. After the accidental death of her mother, Sara is forced to move from Lemont, a quiet Chicago suburb, to her father's ghetto apartment on Chicago's gritty south side. The new urban environment, very different than what she is used to, adds to Sara's feelings of loss and frustration, and her misplaced guilt, which is caused by the fact that her mother had been en route to her dance performance at the time of her death. But when she meets Derek, a popular fellow student with a passion for hip hop dancing and a future brighter than his troubled past, her repressed ambition is released through a revitalized interest in dance.