15 Dec Filmwax Radio|EP 449: LAURA TERRUSO • NANCY BUIRSKI • JONATHAN OLSHEFSKI, SABRINA SCHMIDT GORDON & THE RAINEYS

[42 mins. 21 secs.] In the second segment, filmmaker Nancy Buirski returns. Nancy was last on Episode 346 where she discussed her last documentary By Sidney Lumet. Nancy is back with a new documentary, The Rape of Recy Taylor, which had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival and its US premiere at the New York Film Festival.  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 is currently enjoying a theatrical role at the Laemmle Monica Center in Los Angeles and will be doing the same at the IFC Center in NYC beginning this Friday, December 15th....

11 Dec flickfilosopher | The Rape of Recy Taylor documentary review: meet the unheralded badass black women of recent American history

"Enraging, and eye-opening, the beginning of the antidote for how black women’s lives get erased in America. Tells a story that we should recognize as epic"

11 Dec The New Yorker | 2017 In Review The Best Movies of 2017 By Richard Brody

35. “The Rape of Recy Taylor” (Nancy Buirski)

Essential viewing, not least for its emphasis on the crucial role of women in the civil-rights movement. Read more.

11 Dec FilmWeek | ‘The Shape of Water,’ ‘I, Tonya,’ and more

Larry Mantle and KPCC film critics Claudia Puig, Peter Rainer, and Charles Solomon review this weekend’s new movie releases.

11 Dec The New York Post | Even before the bus, Rosa Parks had a history of heroism

“The mythology around her was that she was this tired seamstress who just didn’t want to change her seat on the bus,” says the film’s director, Nancy Buirski, referring to the 1955 event that turned Parks into a civil-rights icon. But that doesn’t square with the woman we meet here, 11 years before — when Parks, long an activist, investigated sexual assault for the NAACP. The organization sent her to the small town of Abbeville, Ala., to interview Taylor, a black wife and mother who had been gang-raped by six white men and defied the warnings of her gun-wielding attackers to stay silent.

11 Dec The Nation | Voiceless Desire Of all the big year-end films, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is the most deeply moving.

"In The Rape of Recy Taylor, documentarian Nancy Buirski assembles a collage of interviews, texts, music, and archival images (including excerpts of race movies) to tell the story of Taylor and Parks in the immediate wake of the crime and during its very long aftermath. The result is a striking hybrid: at once impressionistic and argumentative, focused on individuals but also alert to the role, frequently unheralded, that women played in the civil-rights movement. Not to be missed." - The Nation Magazine

11 Dec Newsday | Gary Oldman to be honored by makeup artists

THE EVENT Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film FestivalTHE DEAL The 10th annual edition of the festival, which begins Thursday, features a wide range of recent films that you may have missed, including “High School 9-1-1,” about a Connecticut town whose only ambulance service is run by teenagers; “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” a salute to a black rape survivor who in 1944 dared to publicly accuse six white men of the crime; and Susan Froemke’s “The Opera House,” a deep dive into 133 years of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Many screenings feature Q&A sessions with the filmmakers.INFO Though Dec. 4 at the Bay Street Theater, 1 Bay St., Sag Harbor. Tickets are $15; passes are $150; 631-237-8055, ht2ff.com...

11 Dec The Washington Post | The gang rape was horrific. The NAACP sent Rosa Parks to investigate.

"Taylor’s rape is the subject of a new documentary that coincides with a wave of sexual assault and harassment accusations against powerful men. But in 1944, obtaining justice for a black woman in the segregated South was nearly impossible."

11 Dec Deadline | ‘The Rape Of Recy Taylor’ Trailer: The Heart-Wrenching Docu Tells A Timely Story For Black Women

Nancy Buirski’s documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor premiered its first trailer today to paint a tragic picture of the titular Taylor and her story that rings true to today’s treatment of women — black women in particular.

11 Dec Deadline | NAACP Image Awards Nominees: Netflix, OWN Lead In TV; Universal, Annapurna, Open Road Top Film

The NAACP Image Awards celebrates the accomplishments of people of color in the fields of television, music, literature and film, and also honors individuals or groups who promote social justice through creative endeavors.  NAACP members vote to select NAACP Image Awards winners from nominees in television, music literature, and film.

DOCUMENTARY

Outstanding Documentary (Film)

“I Called Him Morgan” (Submarine Deluxe/Filmrise)
“STEP” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
“Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities” (Firelight Films)
“The Rape of Recy Taylor” (Augusta Films)
“Whose Streets?” (Magnolia Pictures)