Just Do It

Banished Screening

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jan 23, 2008

Sat., Jan. 26, 4 p.m., free, Pearl Theatre, 1600 N. Broad St., 215-222-4201, scribe.org

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Even if you're aware of the worst that the history of American racism has to offer, you may be shocked by Marco Williams' Banished. Although it's a documentary, the movie feels more like horror, such is the enormity at its center. Williams' subject is the forced expulsion of African-Americans from several small (and not so small) American towns. In Georgia, Arkansas, Indiana and Missouri, he visits places where the populations are almost uniformly white. Forsyth, Ga., has just 40 African-Americans in a county of some 34,000. Williams is a patient but persistent on-camera presence; even die-hard racists reveal themselves to him, including one elderly man who says that his hometown is a good place to live because it has "no blacks." Chilling and all too real, Banished exposes an American nightmare from which we have yet to awake.

At a screening presented by ITVS Community Cinema and Scribe Video Center, Williams will be part of a post-film panel discussion addressing reparations and approaches to reconciliation. Earlier in the day, he will lead a Scribe workshop titled Oppositional Filmmaking, in which he will show new work and discuss how he reconciles opposing characters in constructing his documentary storylines.

 

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