David and Suzanne's Documentary, FREE, Premieres at the Mill Valley Film Festival

Over the last four years, David Collier, founder and director of Studio B Films, and his fiancée, Suzanne LaFetra, have been working on a new documentary, FREE.

It had been fifteen years since David has last produced a feature length documentary. Suzanne had previously been executive producer on a documentary. A very talented writer and storyteller, but Suzanne wanted to produce a film of her own. David and Suzanne decided to team up.

They discovered the Destiny Art Center as a documentary subject after seeing a performance in Oakland. The show is created by teenagers and through dance and monologues they tell their stories.

David and Suzanne were taken by the teens performance abilities, but equally impressed by courage to get up on stage and talk about serious issues. The documentary follows a year-in-the-life of five teens as they go through the program.

Destiny’s Art Center provides an escape and helps to build a new confidence in teenagers. This allows them to, hopefully, break free from the events in their lives which have deeply affected them.

Oakland has a 63% high school graduation rate. As a testament to the success of the dance program all five of the teenagers profiled in FREE have now gone on to graduate from high school and gone on to higher education and other projects.

This weekend, FREE will premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival, with a special performance by the dancers of Destiny’s Art Center, and will give the public a chance to see the wonderful work that Destiny’s Art Center does.

For more information about FREE, please visit, www.freethedocumentary.com/