Three episodes of “Brick City,” the new Sundance Channel show, screened at the School of Visual Art’s E. 23rd St. theater on Sunday. The documentary series chronicles current-day Newark and its daunting challenges. Clockwise, from above, Marc Levin, “Brick City”’s director and producer, with Caroline Kennedy; Newark Mayor Cory Booker, right, with Newark Police Director Garry McCarthy; Deshaun “Jiwe” Morris, a Newark Bloods gang member, author and antiviolence advocate, left, with Mark Benjamin, an executive producer of “Brick City.” Also attending was former Newark Mayor James Sharpe, who was freed from jail last April after serving 18 months for fraud involving the sale of city-owned property. Last May, in The Villager, documentarian Clayton Patterson wrote about “Brick City” and the Newark Bloods’ and Crips’ foiled effort to have a unity basketball game. “This is one of the few TV shows that they could take and it could be a movie,” Patterson said. The footage is real, not fictionalized, he assured. “If you watch ‘Brick City,’ you can definitely see dead people in the street after a shooting… breaking into apartments with police. It’s right now — right, f—n’ now, baby.” Patterson added the series has “won a bunch of Sundance Awards.”
