Filmmaker Marco Williams will discuss his film, Two Towns of Jasper at a free film screening Oct. 7 at 5:30 p.m. at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History.
Williams is a professor in the department of film and TV at the Tisch School at NYU.
Williams’s films have won numerous prizes, including the DoubleTake/Full Frame Grand Prize and the CDS Filmmaker Award.
Two Towns of Jasper documents the aftermath of the 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr., who was chained to a pick-up truck and dragged to death by three white men in Jasper, Texas. To make the film, Williams and fellow filmmaker Whitney Dow led two film crews, one black and one white, who followed the trials of the men charged with the crime and documented townspeople’s reactions. They then merged their footage and edited collaboratively, seeking to provide an honest language to talk about race in America. With the deaths of James Craig Anderson, Trayvon Martin, and Jordan Davis fresh in our minds, this film’s innovative framing of Byrd’s story offers troubling insights into the persistence of racialized violence yet holds out hope for bridging the racial divide.
For more information on the event, please contact Patricia Sawin, department of American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill, at sawin@unc.edu or 919-962-4065
The event is sponsored by the department of American atudies and the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Find out more:
http://sonjahaynesstonectr.unc.edu/
