by Mary Glucksman

Sonja Sohn and Isaach de Bankolé in The Killing Zone.

Joe Brewster had a problem. With just three weeks to go before shooting his microbudget second feature, The Killing Zone, he discovered that the contractor renovating the turn-of-the-century Brooklyn brownstone in which key scenes in the film were to be shot – and following production, where Brewster's family would reside – had absconded with some $10,000 worth of materials. That was July 1. By the time cameras rolled on the film – which features Isaach de Bankolé, star of Brewster's first feature, The Keeper, along with Slam's Sonja Sohn – the key scenes had been rewritten to accommodate the condition of the house and Brewster had raised enough cash to later complete renovation.

Killing Zone is the digitally shot story of an affluent Harlem psychiatrist living an unexamined life until his adoptive father – a doctor who plucked him from a Nigerian refugee camp as a child – is gunned down by an eleven-year-old in Brooklyn. In an instant, everything he's absorbed in twenty years in America is thrown into question, and his search for the boy resurrects memories of his own buried past.

That Brewster's second feature should focus on a psychiatrist is no coincidence. Harvard trained and a veteran of 15 year's private practice in the field, he based The Keeper on his experiences working with New York City prison inmates; he has also partially completed a documentary on affirmative action students at New York's Dalton School, where his son is in kindergarten.

Isaach de Bankolé and Idris Brewster in The Killing Zone.

"Remember Bad Lieutentant?" asks Brewster. "This is Bad Psychiatrist. When [the protagonist of Killing Zone] finds a child caught up in the same violence [he endured] at eleven, he begins to disintegrate. It's a study of the psychological impact of violence committed by children – with the Brooklyn boy cast as a modern-day Oliver Twist."

With the New York portion of Killing Zone in the can, Brewster and producer Michèle Stephenson left for Ghana in late October to shoot the film's prologue. Stephenson, Brewster's wife, is a documentary filmmaker and attorney who, until recently, ran Peter Gabriel's Witness program for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. (She was responsible for training laymen to use video cameras to document refugee conditions and human rights violations around the world, including Ghana.)

"There's a child-soldier element to this film," says Stephenson, "with parallels between the [homeless Brooklyn] boy who does the shooting" and flashbacks from the psychiatrist's past as a child refugee [and soldier]. "We're trying to illuminate a connection between what's going on in the U.S. and in West Africa, where children are picking up guns and fighting in armed conflict."

Contact: Michèle Stephenson/Joe Brewster: radafilm@aol.com.

Witness info/streaming video: witness.org (witness@lchr.org).

Joe Brewster also scouts black- and Latin-themed indie features for video distributor Delta Entertainment, a new MTI subsidiary that will release up to 24 films a year (info at deltaent.com).