Last November, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee got a call from Michael Harreld, the regional president of PNC Bank, offering the bank’s building at 15th and Pennsylvania NW as a spot for DCPS students to view Barack Obama’s inaugural parade in January. The bank also donated video cameras to teams of students from different high schools to shoot documentaries about the inauguration. At a screening of those documentaries on Wednesday night, Harreld told the assembled students and their families and mentors, “We lent you a facility, and you made it history.”

Now that it’s June the inauguration may seem like old news, but these films are refreshingly candid, hilarious, and often-poignant records of what D.C. communities were thinking and feeling back in January. “Most of them have even started caring about their futures,” a student at Luke C. Moore Academy says of his classmates. “You can no longer go off the same expectations.” An older woman captured in one film explains, “I knew it was going to happen, I just didn’t know it would happen in my time.” A shy fifth-grader tells the camera that she felt “Excited. Happy. All kinds of words.”