Brooklyn Castle 2012

Overview

Released in the United States on October 19, 2012, Brooklyn Castle is a documentary film directed and produced within the documentary genre, carrying a PG rating and running for one hour and forty-one minutes. The documentary focuses on I.S. 318, an inner-city school where over sixty-five percent of the students come from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level. Despite these economic challenges, the school maintains the best and most winning junior high school chess team in the country, to the extent that Albert Einstein, rated 1800, would only rank as the fifth best player if he were to join the team. The success of the chess program transformed the institution from a school cited in 2003 as needing improvement into one of New York City's best schools. However, these hard-won achievements are threatened by a series of recession-driven public school budget cuts.