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Saturday, Mar 16, 2024
7 PM (140 mins)
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BAMPFA
The Underground Railroad: Chapters 5, 6 & 7
In Conversation
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Academy Award–nominated editor Joi McMillon—known for her work on Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Zola—led the editorial department on The Underground Railroad.
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Mychal-Bella Bowman portrays Grace/Fanny Briggs in The Underground Railroad.
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Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is associate professor of History at UC Berkeley.
An essential reckoning with America’s history of slavery, Barry Jenkins’s brilliant adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning magnum opus renders Whitehead’s uncanny, parallel-universe nineteenth-century American South with exacting realism. The series follows Cora’s flight—aided by a network of people who provide a subterranean train service for fugitives—from the Georgia plantation on which she was born enslaved and her pursuit by a relentless slave catcher.
Moving through five states, all of which suggest different eras from antebellum through reconstruction, The Underground Railroad demonstrates various forms of racist exploitation to which Black people were, and too often still are, subjected, along with the strategies of resistance and self-preservation developed in response. As Reggie Ugwu noted in the New York Times, as well as confronting the physical violence of slavery, Jenkins’s adaptation addresses “something subtler, about the psychic and emotional scourge, and the unfathomable spiritual strength required for any individual—let alone an entire people—to have come out alive.”
Films in this Screening
The Underground Railroad—Chapter 5: Tennessee—Exodus
Barry Jenkins, United States, 2021
FEATURING
Thuso Mbedu
Joel Edgerton
Chase W. Dillon
Calvin Leon Smith
FILM DETAILS
Screenwriter
- Nathan C. Parker
Based On
the novel by Colson Whitehead
Cinematographer
- James Laxton
Print Info
- Color
- DCP
- 61 mins
source
- Amazon Studios
The Underground Railroad—Chapter 6: Tennessee—Proverbs
Barry Jenkins, United States, 2021
FEATURING
Thuso Mbedu
Joel Edgerton
Chase W. Dillon
Peter Mullan
FILM DETAILS
Screenwriter
- Barry Jenkins
- Nathan C. Parker
Based On
the novel by Colson Whitehead
Cinematographer
- James Laxton
Print Info
- Color
- DCP
- 59 mins
source
- Amazon Studios
The Underground Railroad—Chapter 7: Fanny Briggs
Barry Jenkins, United States, 2021
FEATURING
Mychal-Bella Bowman
Lily Rabe
Lucy Faust
Denitra Isler
FILM DETAILS
Screenwriter
- Jihan Crowther
Based On
the novel by Colson Whitehead
Cinematographer
- James Laxton
Print Info
- Color
- DCP
- 20 mins
source
- Amazon Studios
Event Accessibility
If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at bampfa@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 642-1412 (during open hours) with as much advance notice as possible. More information on accessibility services.