Brownstones in the Aspen Daily News

Damien Williamson over at Aspen Daily News gave Brownstones a very nice shout-out is his festival preview story:

But it is perhaps in the quieter films, like “Brownstones to Red Dirt,” that the true character of Filmfest emerges. In the movie, sixth-graders from an elementary school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., which as recently as 2005 was declared an “impact zone” due to the excessive violence in the community, were paired with students in war-town Sierra Leone for a pen-pal program.

Co-director Dave LaMattina had been working in an animation studio, and was looking for “a project with a little more meaning.”

“I had done a film in South Africa on kids with HIV and AIDS,” LaMattina says. “So I was looking for something along those lines. And what I really wanted to do was find a story where there was hope in a community where you wouldn’t expect it.”

The results were astounding. The kids in Bed-Stuy were able to gain perspective on their own lives through interactions with the orphaned children that struggled for food, water and electricity — though who still had similar goals and aspirations — in Sierra Leone. And the African children gained something that had been denied them for most of their lives: someone who cared.