Brooklyn Teens Win Award at Sundance

NEW YORK (AP) _ Two teenagers who made a documentary on gun violence in a Brooklyn housing project have won a special award at the Sundance Film Festival. <br/><br/>The festival in Park City, Utah created

Monday, January 31st 2005, 10:53 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ Two teenagers who made a documentary on gun violence in a Brooklyn housing project have won a special award at the Sundance Film Festival.

The festival in Park City, Utah created a special recognition award for ``Bullets in the Hood: A Bed-Stuy Story,'' a 22-minute film by Terrence Fisher, 19, and Daniel Howard, 18. The award was bestowed Saturday.

Fisher and Howard, sponsored by the nonprofit media company Downtown Community Television Center, set out to show the self-destructive gun culture that had claimed the lives of eight of Fisher's friends.

The filmmakers captured the fallout from the Jan. 24, 2004, fatal police shooting of another teenager, Fisher's close friend Timothy Stansbury, 19. Fisher witnessed the shooting on the roof of the Louis Armstrong Houses project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section and turned his fury into inspiration.

``I hope that `Bullets in the Hood' will help keep the streets safe and teach youth in our community about what's happening on our streets,'' Fisher said in a statement after receiving the award.

Co-director Jon Alpert, who founded the Downtown Community Television Center, praised the young filmmakers for their grit.

``They basically came from the projects of Brooklyn and went to the mountains of Utah with a story that everybody needs to know about,'' he said Sunday in a statement.

Fisher grew up in the Louis Armstrong Houses. Howard grew up in another Brooklyn project.