Tune in Tuesday, August 31st. at 7PM (PST) as KXLU Los Angeles proudly presents Center Stage with Mark Gordon featuring special guests: Madeleine Sackler director of THE LOTTERY and Frederico Lapenda producer of SEQUESTRO (KIDNAPPING).
THE LOTTERY uncovers a ferocious debate surrounding the U.S. education reform movement, while examining charter schools as a solution to deal with the crisis now before even more children fall behind.
THE LOTTERY, the controversial feature-length documentary about the crisis of U.S. public education reform, will be available in stores nationwide starting August 31, 2010. The film follows four families from Harlem and the Bronx who entered their children in a 2009 charter school lottery, hoping to avoid the failures of the traditional public school system. In a country where 58% of African American 4th graders are functionally illiterate, these families represent the hundreds of thousands of parents attempting to flee the system every year. Director Madeleine Sackler uncovers a ferocious debate surrounding the U.S. education reform movement, while examining charter schools as a solution to deal with the crisis now before even more children fall behind.
"The four families in THE LOTTERY all have the same goal for their children: a high-quality education that will provide them with the opportunity for a better future. If we continue to be complacent about schools that are failing, and if we don't make it possible for excellent schools to grow, we are not only sentencing the most disadvantaged in our communities to devastating consequences, we are putting the future of the country at risk," said Sackler. "THE LOTTERY makes the case that any child can succeed."
SEQUESTRO (KIDNAPPING)
Award-winning filmmaker Jorge W. Atalla (In Cane for Life/A Vida em Cana) brings to the screen SEQUESTRO (KIDNAPPING), a powerful Brazilian documentary chronicling the heroic efforts of the Anti Kidnapping Division of the São Paulo police department (Divisão Anti-Sequestro aka DAS) from 2005 until 2009 - a time when kidnapping was booming business in Latin America's largest city.
SEQUESTRO travels deep into the seedy world of organized abductions for the purposes of extortion, exploring the lives of those victimized while tagging along with investigators as they work around the clock, following clues and apprehending suspects in effort to locate victims before it's too late. SEQUESTRO, often set in some of the nastiest neighborhoods in the world, is a pioneering feat of filmmaking that captures for the first time on film, what it is like for police who risk life and limb busting into captive houses, in an attempt to find and free men, women, and children who have been violently separated from their families.
Comments