Small Forces Film BT Lives in the Stitch will air on season two of Illinois Public Media’s Reel Midwest, an independent film series that helps to find and broadcast the best feature, documentary, and short films from Illinois and across the Midwest.

On March 26th, viewers across Illinois can tune into their PBS station to see the story of North Lawndale College Prep’s knitting program. The high school is located on the south side of Chicago, in a neighborhood notable more for urban blight than quality education. Then, teacher Dorothea Tobin introduced the BT Lives in the Stitch program, creating a much needed after-school program as well as an avid knitting circle amongst an unlikely group of teens.

The short film will screen alongside This Has Been To Space, a film that follows a group of kids and astrophysicists as they launch a high-altitude balloon—outfitted with cameras, GPS, a Geiger counter, action figures, seeds, and a Twizzler “payload” —and follow it across the country. Once reunited with their supercharged souvenirs, the kids watch their space video: the curvature of the earth, the perilous descent — and everyone gets a bite of the Twizzler.

Learn more here: https://will.illinois.edu/reelmidwest