Join the Sustainability Institute and WPSU for the next screening in its Building Better Bonds film series, part of the Sustainability Institute’s Intersections film program. As part of Penn State’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Week of events, we are screening a triptych of three short films that examine the recent histories of violence–both physical and symbolic–against African Americans in the United States and begin discussions about how individuals and communities are trying to rebuild our communities into safer, more inclusive spaces that create a sense of belonging. The films deal with themes and events by turns triggering and horrifying but the films also underline the powers of resilience and the importance of dialogues in our communities.

• Quiet No More (Eléonore Hamlin, 2020, 27 min.) — When the Rev. Sharon Risher’s mother and cousin are killed by a white supremacist in the shooting at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston in 2015, she struggles with the act of forgiveness and the burden repeatedly placed on the African American community to have to be the bigger party who forgives and accepts the violence wrought on it. This film chronicles her personal emotional journey through the aftermath and how she channels her feelings into something redemptive.
• Silence Sam (Courtney Staton and Jeremiah Rhodes, 2018, 30 min.) — Students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill had had enough. For decades, the statue at the center of the campus’s historic quad has been Silent Sam, a tribute to Confederate soldiers erected long after the Civil War and explicitly to invoke white supremacy. Now the students are determined to topple the statue and what it stands for, with or without the support of the university administration. A film told by university journalism students about the power of students to remake our communities.
• Say His Name: Five Days for George Floyd (Cy Dodson, 2021, 27 min.) — In 2020, Derek Chauvin and other cops in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd in broad daylight, horrifying the world and galvanizing a national movement demanding reform. But in Minneapolis the pain and outrage were even more visceral, as Cy Dodson’s film portrays as Dodson, a resident of the neighborhood where Floyd was murdered, bears witness to the breaking of the community in the aftermath and the slow process of starting to rebuild the community back together.

All our film screenings are free and open to the public. The film will screen online at WPSU’s OVEE platform and be followed by a Zoom discussion. Pre-registration is required at this link.