For years, the fight over whether to expand school choice in Florida has been a bitter struggle waged by lawmakers, teachers unions and parents.

But it’s only part of a larger national struggle to give economically disadvantaged parents opportunities to take their children out of failing schools and into schools they can’t normally afford, according to a New York City-based documentary film due out this week.

A glimpse of the ugliness and of the battle for expanded school choice can be seen in screenings of “The Lottery” in two Florida cities today.

The full-length documentary will be shown in Ybor City and Hialeah at 7:30 p.m.  It gets a limited release starting Friday, premiering in New York, where it is set, and then opens in other theaters.

In the film, director and editor Madeleine Sackler documents a 2008 lottery to accept 475 students into the Harlem Success Academy, a much in-demand, publicly funded charter school.

The film, noting that 58 percent of black fourth graders are functionally illiterate, follows four low-income black families who entered the names of their children into the lottery.

While the Success Academy was planning the lottery, it was also mulling a move into PS 194, a nearby failing public school. The decision whether to allow the move was to be made before the lottery winners were chosen, and it could have decided whether the charter school could have held lotteries in the future.

The move prompted protests at the school, which Sackler, a freelance film editor on TV programs at the time, was fortunate enough to film. What she witnessed were protests from not only parents and the United Federation of Teachers, but also the members of the now infamous ACORN community activism group. UFT had paid the then-powerful national lobby to help defeat the move.

"It was very clear that most of the people who were there were paid to be there," Sackler said. "They didn't know much about the school. They didn't know much about the community."