18 Jun

Posted at 10:30h in Reviews

“The number of black women raped by white men in our country’s past is staggering,” reads the intertitle at the start of Nancy Buirski’s harrowing documentary. Buirski tells the story of one of those rapes. Recy Taylor was a young mother from Alabama who was assaulted at gunpoint by a gang of six white youths as she left church. The attack took place in 1944. Buriski has interviewed Taylor’s siblings and contemporaries. Her approach to the material is sombre, matter of fact and quietly devastating. Her interviews reveal the casual brutality of the white youngsters who “felt they could do it and get away with it” and who had been brought up to believe “the black woman’s body didn’t belong to her”. The response to the crime was revealing. Some of Recy’s assailants lived close by, “two football fields away”, and they could have been easily identified. Nonetheless, the authorities did next to nothing. A grand jury made up of local white men was predictably...

18 Jun

Posted at 10:29h in Reviews

Kate Erbland On a quiet late summer night in tiny Abbeville, Alabama, a car full of young white men cruised the streets, searching. They were looking for a mark, Nancy Buirski’s wrenching documentary “The Rape of Recy Taylor” tells us, eventually settling on a trio of black neighbors walking home from evening church services. Recy Taylor, then just 24-years-old, a wife and mother to a nine-month-old, a local sharecropper with ties to the community, was one of them. The car’s passengers — seven of them, including the sons of some of the town’s most notable residents — took Taylor to a secluded stand of trees, forced her to strip naked, and then raped her. (One voiceover tells it plainly without the need for details: “What they did to her? They didn’t need to live.”) Buirski’s latest documentary, a worthy companion to her lauded “The Loving Story,” tells Taylor’s story in expressive detail, aided by Buirski’s creative approach to pulling together material. Composed of...

18 Jun

Posted at 10:28h in Reviews

DOCUMENTARIAN NANCY BUIRSKI TRACES THIS SHAMEFUL 1944 INCIDENT AND THE LEGAL FIASCO THAT FOLLOWED, HONORING A WOMAN OF COLOR WHO DARED TO SPEAK OUT AFTER BEING SEXUALLY ASSAULTED BY A GROUP OF WHITE YOUTHS. The plaintive voice of Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth," backed by the mournful strings of Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight," is heard over disturbing images from an early 20th century race movie that show a terrified black woman running for her life. That opening brings a powerful emotional charge that resonates throughout The Rape of Recy Taylor. With lucidity and deep feeling, Nancy Buirski's documentary maps an ugly trail of injustice and then widens its lens to pay tribute to the women of color whose refusal to be silent helped drive the evolution of the Civil Rights movement. The case that supplies the title and the narrative spine of the movie is one of countless like it in the Jim Crow South. Recy Taylor was a...

18 Jun

Posted at 10:27h in Reviews

"The Rape of Recy Taylor” is a powerful documentary that brings to life the historical 1944 trial that led to the civil rights movement.  Writer, director and producer Nancy Buriski ( Emmy and Peabody award winning , “ The Loving Story”documentary, producer of Oscar nominated feature film  “Loving”)  film’s timely exploration of racism, violence to women and  injustice in American history is a bellwether for today’s women’s rights action, silence breakers and #MeToo movement. After returning from an Alabama community  church service with her husband, Recy is forced at gunpoint into a car and brutally sexually assaulted  by six white men in a field.  The 24 year old African American  wife and mother is undaunted by the sheriffs recriminations and threats to her and her family files charges. Her refusal to be silent  about the attack was unheard of in the Jim Crow segregated state. The legacy  of slavery in the South had  left a stain of inhumanity towards women of color  who had...

18 Jun

Posted at 10:26h in Reviews

By Jeannette Catsoulis 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. As if apprised in advance of our current political moment, the director, Nancy Buirski, wields the titular violation as a signpost to a wider, more insidious American crime. In this way, the 1944 gang-rape of one black woman in Alabama becomes emblematic of the effacement of an entire gender. Were it not for the director’s steady hand and adamantine focus on her destination, this ambition could have been the film’s undoing. Instead, its scope is stirring, the gradual accumulation of insult and outrage reaching far beyond tiny Abbeville where the crime occurred and where Recy, then 24, lived with her husband and new daughter. The miracle, though, is that the movie isn’t a diatribe. Its voices — including several members of Recy’s family and that of Rosa Parks herself, who investigated the assault — are...

18 Jun

Posted at 10:25h in Reviews

by Scout Tafoya On the night of September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a black woman, was walking in Alabama when seven white men rode up in a car, accused her of violence against a man she hadn't committed, and then forced her in the car at gunpoint. They drove her a few miles into darkness, taunted and terrorized her, threatened to kill her, and then six of the seven men raped and maimed her. No one was punished. Recy Taylor is now in her 90s and the country that denied her justice appears to be in freefall back toward the frightening political climate that allowed her attackers to go free. Her brother Robert Corbitt talked about the issue as much as he could afterwards because there was so much buried in this single incident. Every horrific stereotype foisted on the black community by white people was proven a cowardly projection of their own sexual violence and hideous prejudice, abusing their powers in...