FILMS
THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR
Nancy Buirski, 91 min.
Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Common in Jim Crow South, few women spoke up in fear for their lives. Not Recy Taylor, who bravely identified her rapists. The NAACP sent its chief rape investigator Rosa Parks, who rallied support and triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice. Our film exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks’ intimate role in Recy Taylor’s story. An attempted rape against Parks was but one inspiration for her ongoing work to find justice for countless women like Taylor. The 1955 bus boycott was an end result, not a beginning. More and more women are now speaking up after rape. Our film tells the story of black women who spoke up when danger was greatest; it was their noble efforts to take back their bodies that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and movements that followed. The 2017 Global March by Women is linked to their courage. From sexual aggression on ‘40s southern streets to today’s college campuses and to the threatened right to choose, it is control of women’s bodies that powered the movement in Recy Taylor’s day and fuels our outrage today.
**New York Film Festival Official Selection**
ImageNation presents a special screening - March 13, 2018 at 7pm.
Followed by a Director Q & A.
DAYS OF HOPE
Ditte Haarløv Johnsen, 60 min.
Days of Hope weaves three immigrant stories into a unflinching portrait of courage and sacrifice as they travel, by any means, across deserts and oceans from Africa to Europe in the hopes of providing a better life for the families they leave behind. Days of Hope presents the human side of these immigrant stories as they discover that to traverse the waters that separate them from one continent is one thing; to traverse the gulf that separates them from the rest of humanity is quite another.
Presented in partnership with the NBPC's Afropop the Ultimate Experience.
1982
Directed by Tommy Oliver, 90 min., USA
Starring Hill Harper, Sharon Leal, Wayne Brady, Troi Zee, La La Anthony and Ruby Dee -- chronicles a Philadelphia father’s struggle to protect his daughter from the reality of her mother’s drug addiction. Hill Harper delivers a brilliantly nuanced and powerful performance as a man on the verge of exploding with rage and fear, alongside Sharon Leal, who gives a chilling portrayal of an addict, and Wayne Brady, who is nearly unrecognizable as a local gangster.
Presented as part of "Cocktails, Cinema & Revolution!", the this showing is preceded by VIP cocktail reception, REVOLUTION AWARDS presentations to: Ava DuVernay (Academy-Award nominated director of SELMA), Melissa Harris-Perry (author, activist, and journalist of MSNBC), #BlackLivesMatter; and author, actor and activist Hill Harper (of the tv series Limitless and CSI, NY). The film will be followed by a Q&A, and an afterparty spun by DJ Esxence.