A highlight of this year’s Academy Awards was 12-year-old Porche Brinker, marching proudly to the stage in her baby-blue gown when The Last Repair Shop won Best Documentary Short Film. Created by the composer Kris Bowers (Green Book, The Color Purple, Bridgerton) and the documentary filmmaker Ben Proudfoot (The Queen of Basketball), the film goes inside a Los Angeles warehouse where a small group of craftspeople repair and maintain approximately 80,000 musical instruments for the city’s public high school students. It profiles four of these craftspeople, and talks to the students—Brinker, a violinist, among them—who benefit from their painstaking labor. “The Last Repair Shop is about the heroes in our schools who often go unsung, un-thanked, and unseen,” said Bowers in his acceptance speech. “Tonight, you are sung, you are thanked, and you are seen.” —Paulina Prosnitz
The Arts Intel Report
The Last Repair Shop
Porche Brinker in The Last Repair Shop.
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