BIFF Roundtables: Racial Justice in View

Oct 11 @ 3:00pm-4:30pm – live discussion streamed to social + website

This roundtable is comprised of filmmakers presenting work in Buffalo Int’l Film Festival’s new Racial Justice in View Shorts Block – a curated program of shorts that includes documentary, experimental, video essays, and everything in between – exploring racism, protest, police brutality and inequality in the United States, Canada and sovereign Indigenous lands. Discussion will focus on the film selections and related topics.

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Roundtable Participants: Maya Bastian + Léwuga Benson + Klementina Budnik + Akash Dewan + Jason "JaFLEU" Fleurant + Stacey Larkins + Dan Lior + Sydney Morgan + Classic Reinvention + Licmi (Dhwani) Sikri + Bradley Oliver Wilkinson-Vega

Moderators: Tammy McGovern + Renee Saracki + Paige Sarlin + Anna Scime

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Topics for consideration include (but are not limited to):

The Fire This Time; Race at the Boiling Point; Witness Narratives; Intersectional Injustice; Cops: The Good, The Bad + The Ugly; Structures of Inequality; Protest + Other Forms of Dissent; Rights + Law in Postmodern Democracy; Tactical + Strategic Media; Engaging the Political Process (For Better +/or Worse); Radical Love + Reform

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The Buffalo Int’l Film Festival is committed to diversity, inclusion, and community collaboration programmatically and organizationally. Our mission is to amplify diverse voices by creating and maintaining open platforms with which to tell stories through cinema. Recent events in our nation, as well as those occurring locally in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and far too many others, have underscored the urgency of addressing racial injustice, and listening to the people that experience and witness these injustices first hand. We support and stand by the Black Lives Matter movement, and its efforts to educate, bring visibility, and spark discussions around the racism, systemic injustice and violence that has plagued this country since colonization. Through our festival platform, we hope to contribute to the work that BIPOC lead movements like BLM and many others are doing to transform these systems in order to fully enable equal rights, liberty and justice for all.