Events

Description

Across his three feature films to date (Medicine for Melancholy, Moonlight, and If Beale Street Could Talk), Barry Jenkins has devised a new cinematic vocabulary for the portrayal of Black experience in the United States. With sumptuous imagery and hypnotic soundscapes, Jenkins has embraced aesthetic beauty as a strategy for addressing the past and present injustices that bear on the lives of marginalized characters. His 2021 miniseries, The Underground Railroad is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. A haunting, atmospheric account of two runaway slaves in the Antebellum South, the series is Jenkins’ most daring directorial work yet.

The Ackland Film Forum and the Department of English and Comparative Literature will host two virtual screenings (Tuesdays, September 21 and September 28, 8 p.m.) and a virtual roundtable discussion (Tuesday, October 5, 7 p.m.) in celebration of the department’s 225th anniversary.

Full details and RSVP here