Director Katherine Kubler’s reexamination of her own trauma led her to discover a broader system of abuse.
Netflix
ROXANNE FEQUIERE
FEB. 21, 2024
FEB. 21, 2024
In the years since filmmaker Katherine Kubler left The Academy at Ivy Ridge, she struggled to grapple with the trauma she endured there. Long accustomed to documenting her life on camera, she decided to make a film that would reify her experience. What she discovered was much bigger than the abuse enacted at Ivy Ridge. The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping is Kubler’s new docuseries that explores the unsettling and ever-evolving troubled teen industry, which continues to endanger children while promising parents that they can “fix” the so-called wayward youth of America.
What happened at The Academy at Ivy Ridge?
From the pressures of juggling academics and social hierarchies to the general awkwardness of adolescence, high school rarely ranks among the best days of our lives. For Kubler and her classmates at The Academy at Ivy Ridge, high school was more akin to a prison experience. Advertised as a boarding school designed to rehabilitate troubled teens, Kubler was one of countless students who arrived on campus only to find that her freedoms were drastically and immediately curtailed. Not allowed to talk, smile, go outside, or communicate freely with the outside world, the school operated on a Byzantine system of merits that all but ensured the students wouldn’t be able to leave the school until they turned 18.
In the years since Kubler left The Academy at Ivy Ridge, she struggled to grapple with the trauma she endured there, as well as her father’s reluctance to accept just how harmful her time at the school had been. From coercive marketing tactics to outright abuse and a sprawling network of copycat companies, The Program dives deep into the horrifying realities of what happens when a child is entrusted into the care of the disciplinary school system.
The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping premieres on March 5.
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