NATIONAL YOUNGARTS FOUNDATION presents:
Little Boy Lost: One Child’s Story of Life Behind Bars
Part of the Outside the Box Series featuring Daniel Bernard Roumain
YoungArts Campus
Miami, FL
About Daniel Bernard Roumain:
Daniel Bernard Roumain is a classically trained composer, performer, violinist and band-leader noted for blending funk, rock, hip-hop and classical music into an energetic and experiential sonic form. Daniel’s acclaimed work as a composer and a performer has spanned more than two decades. His collaborations span the worlds of Philip Glass, Cassandra Wilson, Bill T. Jones, Savion Glover and Lady Gaga. Daniel has performed or shown works at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the Olympics and the Sydney Opera House, among many others. He has released four albums.
About “Little Boy Lost:”
Damien, 19 years old, has just been released from state prison less than a year ago. He was incarcerated twice at the young age of 15 and then 16 for aggravated assault that landed him in adult prison. Growing up in Allapattah, an area of inner-city Miami where crime-rates are high and poverty is higher, Damien’s odds of living a successful adult life were stacked up against him. For Damien, most of his friends were also doing minor criminal acts and finding themselves skipping school and getting arrested. It is a vicious cycle of misled youth who react to their hostile environment. For them, prison is just another regular occurrence in their lives.
“Little Boy Lost” follows a day-in-the-life of Damien, who now, one year out of prison, has become a role model in his local community. Now an active mentor and volunteer for Empowered Youth, a local non-profit that helps at-risk 12-18 inner city teens, Damien serves the very neighborhood where he committed crimes in.
This short 20 minute film addresses the issue of youth incarceration and the horrendous system that perpetuates these young men (mainly men of color) in the prison industrial complex.
Coinciding with this subject will be a YoungArts winner who will then, simultaneously, perform a spoken word piece that follows his life of how he, too, could have been another Damien statistic but instead, became a YoungArts fellow.