This article discusses a multi-phase project designed to inquire into and challenge pre-service teachers assumptions, beliefs and knowledge about inner-city schools. Prior to beginning their student teaching in inner-city schools, pre-service teachers articulated in essays and seminar discussions their opinions and beliefs about inner-city schools. They then examined in depth selected cinematic representations of inner-city schools to deconstruct those representations for their "racialized" and "deracialized" discourses, as well as for the "sordid fantasies" and "lullabies" that films set in the inner-city typically construct. Finally, after their experiences student teaching in inner-city schools, pre-service teachers rearticulated their views about inner-city schools, based on their own experiences teaching in such schools. Pre-service teachers discovered the extent to which their views of inner-city schools had been formed through popular representations, and they also discovered how their own experiences in schools revealed the great discrepancy between popular representations of inner-city schools and what such schools are actually like. Pre-service teachers found the process of analysing the school films through the theoretical lenses provided by academic texts to be engaging and productive.