Just a week ago, the Sacramento Press reported on a local documentary about youth homelessness and on Thursday, "Beautiful Youth" screened for a packed house as part of the Sacramento Film & Music Festival SummerFEST.  The Festival contacted the filmmakers as a result of that article and, given only a week of lead time, the size of the audience was both noteworthy and a testament to the interest in the topic.  The film itself has a running time of 47 minutes and was followed by a Q&A session with filmmakers Jennifer Lystrup and Mackenzie Long which lasted equally long.  Even more remarkable, almost the entire audience stayed throughout the post-screening discussion and asked questions of b

The Sacramento Film & Music Festival will be hosting the premiere of Jennifer Lystrup’s film “Beautiful Youth,” a documentary that highlights the issue of youth homelessness in Sacramento, to the public. The documentary sheds light on 10 homeless youths and tells their stories in their own voices. The 47-minute film will be shown at the Crest Theatre at 6 p.m. on Thursday. “I’m so happy to even have this opportunity,” Lystrup said, “It’d be really nice if people from the local city government show up because this is an issue that needs to be addressed.” In a previous Sacramento Press article on the documentary, Lystrup said she had hoped to get a public screening for the film in the f

Jennifer Lystrup, a teacher of social justice at Christian Brothers High School, tackled the ongoing issue of homelessness among youths in her first documentary, “Beautiful Youth.” “Beautiful Youth” chronicles the individual stories of several homeless transition-age youths – youths between the ages of 18 and 24 – in Sacramento told in their own words. “A lot of them were optimistic or at least willing to try to talk about what’s going on. They want to be heard as much as anyone else,” said Sonny Iverson, lead outreach worker for Wind Youth Services. Wind is one of the few programs in Sacramento that deals with ties between homelessness in youths and sexual trafficking of minors. The 47