Events

[SCREENING] On Thursday, February 9, the Burchfield Penney Art Center will screen the film 13TH by director Ava Duvernay. The screening is part of the art center’s series, Beyond Boundaries: Dare to Be Diverse. Duvernay is the first black female director to have a film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture for her 2014 film Selma, the historical drama about Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama in a campaign for equal voting rights for African Americans. Duvernay’s follow up, 13TH—a reference to the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery—is a documentary film about race and the prison-industrial system, which makes the connection between slavery and this country’s current state of mass incarceration. Tthe film begins with the shocking, though maybe not surprising, statistic that 25 percent of the people in the world who are incarcerated are incarcerated in the US.) The series is curated by Buffalo State College professors Ruth Goldman, Meg Knowles, Michael Niman (a columnist for this publication), and Jason Parker. The screening is free and open to the public.