When discussing the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, most people only talk about the twenty children and six faculty who were gunned down that morning--ignoring (understandably) perpetrator Adam Lanza, who took his own life as authorities arrived. Though Lloyd Kramer's sobering and uplifting documentary, Midsummer in Newtown, doesn't dwell on gun control or other attendant political issues, Lanza is mentioned by name as the kind of disturbed and neglected lost soul who once sat in a first-grade classroom just like the one he shot up. Nelba Márquez-Greene, whose daughter, Ana, was among the dead, formed a non-profit organization to help at-risk kids. Her husband wrote a jazz record. A group of Broadway artists visited Newtown to help the students put on a spectacular production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Kramer deftly captures those fleeting magic moments where art and empathy transform lives, washing clean the blood-streaked halls of tragedy.
Listen to Kicking the Seat Podcast #191 for more thoughts on Midsummer in Newtown, with Keeping it Reel's David Fowlie!