Jack Roosevelt Robinson rose from humble origins to cross baseball’s color line and become one of the most beloved men in America. A fierce integrationist, Robinson used his immense fame to speak out against the discrimination he saw on and off the field, angering fans, the press, and even teammates who had once celebrated him for “turning the other cheek.” After baseball, he was a widely-read newspaper columnist, divisive political activist and tireless advocate for civil rights, who later struggled to remain relevant as diabetes crippled his body and a new generation of leaders set a more militant course for the civil rights movement.
Jackie Robinson, a two-part, four-hour film directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon tells the story of an American icon whose life-long battle for first class citizenship for all African Americans transcends even his remarkable athletic achievements. “Jackie Robinson,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.” We’ll be screening a special 90-minute cut of the film along with filmmakers in attendance for discussion moderated by Sridhar Pappu.
David McMahon has been making award-winning documentary films for more than a decade. In 2010, he wrote and produced with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick The Tenth Inning, a two-part, four-hour update to their Emmy Award-winning series, Baseball. With Ken Burns and Sarah Burns, he wrote, produced and directed The Central Park Five, a two-hour film about the five teenagers who were wrongly convicted in the Central Park Jogger case of 1989, which won a Peabody Award and best non-fiction film of 2012 from The New York Film Critics Circle. Most recently, he teamed with Ken Burns and Sarah Burns again to produce and direct Jackie Robinson, a two-part, four-hour biography of the baseball and civil rights icon, for which he and Sarah Burns received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing For A Nonfiction Program. He is currently producing a documentary about public housing.
Sarah Burns is the author of The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding (Knopf, 2011) and, along with David McMahon and Ken Burns, the producer, writer and director of the documentary The Central Park Five, about the five Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted in the infamous Central Park Jogger rape of 1989. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012, was named the Best Non-Fiction film of 2012 by the New York Film Critics Circle and won a 2013 Peabody Award. Most recently, she produced and directed, along with David McMahon and Ken Burns, the two-part, four hour Jackie Robinson, a biography of the celebrated baseball player and civil rights icon, for which she and McMahon received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing For A Nonfiction Program. She is currently working on a documentary about public housing in Atlanta.
A monthly Brooklyn-based screening series highlighting documentary films as a way to to expand dialogue around the intersection of human rights and art. Born out of a three-way collaboration between Skylight, UnionDocs, and WITNESS, these monthly events aim to strengthen the ties between people interested in human rights in Brooklyn and will consist of film screenings followed by a partner-moderated discussion between the filmmaker, movement actors, and the audience. During our discussions we debate the conventional framework for human rights and challenge the definition of what constitutes human rights media.
