Heart of Stone is a 2009 documentary film about Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey, the United States, directed by Beth Toni Kruvant, with Zach Braff serving as executive producer.
The film relates the struggles of Principal Ron Stone and the rest of the school's administration, plus students and alumni to return the school, working with African American and Jewish alumni, to its previous glory in the years before the 1967 Newark riots.
The New York Times described the film as having the potential to be an ordinary story of a hard-nosed principal facing down gang members, but the film actually tells the inspiring portrait of a bold principal who works with gang leaders and Jewish and African American alumni to give his students a hopeful future.
[1][2] Heart of Stone focuses on the crisis in education in Newark as an example for the entire nation, showing how an alumni group raised $400,000 with one of its co-founders being Hal Braff, the attorney father of actor Zach Braff.
Kruvant, a native of Montclair, New Jersey, also directed the documentary Unsung Treasure about American musician David Bromberg, which opened the Woodstock Film Festival 2012 and premiered on PBS, Born in Buenos Aires about the Argentine Jewish community during the political and fiscal crisis of 2001, and The Right to Be Wrong chronicles an Israeli and Palestinian friendship.