“When I met the Brown siblings and their parents in 1999, they seemed like a picture-perfect family,” writes Kristine Jannuzzi on Thursday (1/17) at Steinway.com. “The five brothers and sisters were studying piano at the [Juilliard] school…. The entire family had uprooted from Utah to New York … with their parents, Keith and Lisa Brown. I first got to know them after proposing the siblings as subjects for a BBC documentary…. Keith, soft-spoken and affable, appeared to be the epitome of a supportive, proud father [and later took] on the role of their manager. It came as a complete shock … when the news broke that their father had sexually abused all three sisters…. He was sentenced to 10-years-to-life in prison; his next hearing is in 2022….When filmmaker Ben Niles … approached them about doing a documentary in late 2016, they ultimately decided the time was right to share more about their experiences…. Niles’s film, The 5 Browns: Digging Through The Darkness … was part of several festivals in 2018, and will run at the IFC Center in New York City from January 23–29…. The documentary is heavy, but also uplifting: the bond among the five siblings is clearly genuine.”
Posted January 23, 2019
