On Jan. 28, the Santa Cruz County Office of Education and Monarch Services will co-present the film “The Mask You Live In,” a documentary that explores how boys and young men navigate a society that often demands an unrealistic ideal of masculinity.
The screening will include a discussion with Oakland educator Ashanti Branch, who appears in the film and has built his career around helping young men work through those expectations.
Branch was a civil engineer working as a construction project manager and earning a good salary. By all accounts, he had successfully clawed his way out of the poverty he knew in Oakland, where he was raised by a single mother who worked as a teacher.
“I wanted to be rich,” he said. “I grew up poor, so I knew that poor wasn’t fun.”
But his life took a dramatic turn when he began tutoring struggling students and discovered a passion for working with young people.
He became a teacher and, in his first year in 2004, launched the Ever Forward Club to support African American and Latino males he felt were not meeting their potential.
As he worked more closely with students, Branch said he began to see a pattern: boys were often unsure how to navigate adolescence and early adulthood, particularly in a culture that prizes toughness and emotional control.
“Young men are amazing and incredible and talented,” Branch said, “but they live in a world where they have to keep anything that’s not amazing, talented, and creative alive.”
The rest—what amounts to their potential —must be suppressed until the “dam bursts,” he said.
Branch said the consequences of that pressure can be severe. He pointed to men’s disproportionate presence in the prison system, and said emotional isolation can lead young people to feel constantly on edge.
“Our young men are walking around like landmines,” he said. “They’re not talking about what they’re dealing with. They’re not talking about what’s going on with them. And what ends up happening is an explosion is just brewing.”
Branch said he came to believe that the cultural expectation to “be a man” can be both unrealistic and destructive—and that boys often absorb those expectations long before they understand what they’re being taught to hide.
“The Mask You Live In” explores American masculinity and the cultural script of what it means to be a man — and how those ideas can shape boys’ identities, relationships, and sense of self.
“The film is really just a way of not only helping write a narrative around what’s going on,” Branch said, “but beginning a conversation with families and schools and teachers and educators and coaches: how do we better support boys earlier, before we have to wait until something happens?”
Branch said the messages boys receive about masculinity can be contradictory and constant, coming from peers, media, and online culture.
“There’s a lot of people telling you, ‘Here’s what you have to do to be a real man,’” he said. “‘If you want to be a real man, you better do this. If you want to get respect, you better do this. If you want to get money, you better do this.’”
The uncertainty often doesn’t go away when young men leave high school.
“You’re still thinking, ‘I’m supposed to be an adult, but I’m still just trying to figure it out,’” he said.
Branch said the film’s larger message is not that boys are broken, but that they are often trained to disconnect from empathy and vulnerability — then punished for the results.
“Young men have feelings, have thoughts, can be empathetic, kind, respectful, loving,” he said. “But we train it out of them.”
The most important thing, Branch said, is to support boys by giving them consistent spaces to be honest, to be seen, and to ask questions without shame.
“Nothing was wrong with them,” he said. “But many things happened to them, and they just wanted the benefit of having somebody witness and say, ‘You’re not alone. You don’t have to carry this alone. You’re not meant to ever have to carry this alone.’”
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“The Mask You Live In,” directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, will be screened Jan. 28 at 6 p.m. at CineLux Capitola Café & Lounge, 1475 41st Ave. Branch will be in attendance. It will also be shown Feb. 23 at 6 p.m. at CineLux Scotts Valley Café & Lounge, 226 Mt. Hermon Road.
Tickets are free. Visit sccoe.link/maskyoulivein.
