The story of the 1944 gang-rape of a black woman by a group of white men in Alabama cuts through some overwrought telling
Nancy Buirski’s frustratingly uneven documentary uses footage from early 20th-century “race films” to tell the story of Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black woman who was blindfolded, kidnapped and gang-raped by a group of white men in Abbeville, Alabama, in 1944. Nobody went to jail and no formal apology was issued to Taylor or her family until as late as 2011.
The film becomes a sideways look at civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who investigated the case on behalf of the NAACP 10 years before the Montgomery bus boycott that made her famous. It’s a compelling sliver of her story, helped along by Yale associate professor Crystal Feimster’s sharp commentary on plantation politics and black women in the south, though there remains the worry that the retreading of trauma...
Nancy Buirski’s frustratingly uneven documentary uses footage from early 20th-century “race films” to tell the story of Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black woman who was blindfolded, kidnapped and gang-raped by a group of white men in Abbeville, Alabama, in 1944. Nobody went to jail and no formal apology was issued to Taylor or her family until as late as 2011.
The film becomes a sideways look at civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who investigated the case on behalf of the NAACP 10 years before the Montgomery bus boycott that made her famous. It’s a compelling sliver of her story, helped along by Yale associate professor Crystal Feimster’s sharp commentary on plantation politics and black women in the south, though there remains the worry that the retreading of trauma...
- 5/27/2018
- by Simran Hans
- The Guardian - Film News
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