The Rape of Recy Taylor, just opened in NYC, is the AWFJ - Alliance of Women Film Journalists's Movie of the Week. Here's why: http://ow.ly/COFy30hgzgK #MOTW
...Sexual violence against women of color in the 40s went largely unpunished and a new film aims to shed light on one of the most courageous figures from the era
...Planting a flag firmly at the intersection of patriarchy, sexism and white supremacy, “The Rape of Recy Taylor” is a documentary of multiple layers and marvelous gumption.
..."Taylor’s outspokenness then was a courageous anomaly...
[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....
"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"
...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.
...Larry Mantle and KPCC film critics Claudia Puig, Peter Rainer, and Charles Solomon review this weekend’s new movie releases.
...“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.
..."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
...