Thanks to Aspen FilmFest!

A big thanks to the excellent folks at Aspen FilmFest for screening Brownstones last week and for bringing nearly 100 students to the show! We're planning a special video Q&A with some of the local schools later this fall. More details to come on that!

And here's some additional press from the festival:

Directors LaMattina and Walker follow 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, who were paired with students in war-town Sierra Leone for a school year-long pen-pal program.

“Usually movies that have anything to do with Africa are all about shock value and people’s limbs getting cut off with machetes,” Walker said. “But for me, personally, when I see that type of stuff, I shut down because the problem is too big. So we made a conscious effort to not use footage like that, and just let the kids tell their story. Which, I think, is more powerful.”