Documentary Screening featuring Q&A with Filmmaker Nancy Biurski
Wednesday, September 19 • 6-8pm • Ford Motor Company Theatre
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.
The 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. This 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.
Made possible with the support of the Concannon Family Foundation.
About Filmmaker Nancy BuIrski
Nancy Buirski is a producer and director, known for The Loving Story (2011), Loving (2016) and The Rape of Recy Taylor (2017).
Nancy Buirski is the Director/Producer/Writer of THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR that recently had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival and will have its North American Premiere at the New York Film Festival this October. It was awarded the prestigious Human Rights Nights Special Prize for Human Rights this year at the 74° Venice Biennale. Buirski is the Director/Producer/Writer of BY SIDNEY LUMET (2015) that had its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. She Produced/Directed/Wrote AFTERNOON OF A FAUN (2013), World Premiere at the 51st New York Film Festival, International Premiere at the 64th Berlinale and record-breaking U.S theatrical release by Kino Lorber. She is Director/Producer/Writer of the Oscar shortlisted, Peabody and Emmy Award-winning THE LOVING STORY (2012). She is a Producer of LOVING by Jeff Nichols. She is directing ENDANGERED, an animated feature based on Eliot Schrefer’s YA novel and will direct a narrative version of AFTERNOON OF A FAUN.
Buirski is a member of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences. She founded and ran the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. She is the photographer and author of EARTH ANGELS: MIGRANT CHILDREN IN AMERICA.