This public-school powerhouse in junior high chess competitions has won more than 30 national championships, the most of any school in the country. Its 85-member squad boasts so many strong players that the late Albert Einstein, a dedicated chess maven, would rank fourth if he were on the team. Most astoundingly, I.S. 318 is a Brooklyn school that serves mostly minority students from families living below the poverty line. Brooklyn Castle is the exhilarating story of five of the school's aspiring young players and how chess became the school's unlikely inspiration for academic success.
KATIE DELLAMAGGIORE is a documentary director and television producer whose work has appeared on PBS, MTV, A&E, HBO, Discovery and TLC. Katie is best known for her Emmy Award-nominated film Brooklyn Castle, a story about the nation’s best public school chess team and its fight against after-school budget cuts. Brooklyn Castle won the Audience Award at SXSW, was nationally broadcast on PBS’s acclaimed P.O.V. series, and is being adapted in a narrative film by Sony Pictures and Scott Rudin. Katie also directed “Ur Life Online”, an educational film for A&E Classroom that was Emmy Award- nominated for Outstanding Single Camera Editing and “New Orleans: Here and Now”, a Time Inc. anthology honoring the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. She is currently in production on her next film, The Quiet Zone, which investigates Green Bank, West Virginia - a cell-phone, Wi-Fi free town where astronomers search for intelligent life beyond earth while local residents struggle to live, love, grow up, and evolve on this planet.
