From Nov. 6–7, the inaugural “Playback: The Brooklyn Watch Party” festival will take place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The new festival –– co-hosted by filmmaker Spike Lee and New York Liberty/Brooklyn Nets owner Clara Wu Tsai –– boosts Brooklyn and its cultural, storytelling, and activist traditions.
The two-day event will include watch-party film screenings alongside discussions of the films, curated by celebrity guests Spike Lee, Bryan Stevenson, John Turturro, and Questlove. There will be live music, poetry, and a free street fair. And on the festival’s last night, Nov. 7, there will be a special screening of the 1994 film “Crooklyn,” featuring appearances by Alfre Woodard and Spike Lee.
For Bryan Stevenson — founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) and longtime law professor at New York University — the festival is a chance to show the connections between global storytelling and the struggles in the U.S. criminal legal system. In his years of work as a civil rights attorney, Stevenson has defended children who have been prosecuted as adults, worked to fight mass incarceration, and challenged the death penalty.
Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), is serving as a guest film curator for the inaugural ‘Playback: The Brooklyn Watch Party.’ (Credit: (Playback! photos)
That’s why he selected Mira Nair’s “Salaam Bombay!” (1988) and Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s “City of God” (2002) for festival screenings, he told the AmNews. The films show young people who have to figure out how to survive while facing systemic poverty and street violence in Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro.
“I chose both of the films because they explore poverty, they explore what happens when you live in the margins of a society, they explore the lives of children who have been abandoned and neglected, unloved,” Stevenson said. “So much of my work has been in America’s criminal legal system where there are too many children who have been swallowed by a carceral mindset, a punitive mindset. I’ve represented a lot of kids prosecuted as adults, and that’s always been the most emotionally challenging work because when you represent a 14-year-old who’s facing life without parole, you can’t just be a lawyer; you have to be a father, a brother, an uncle, a friend.”
Stevenson explained that his core belief is that a person’s humanity cannot be defined solely by their worst mistakes. That’s a theme he finds embedded in both films.
“What I loved about both of these films is that they don’t assume that because you do something bad, you are just irredeemably bad. They don’t assume that if you do something illegal, you are nothing but a criminal,” Stevenson noted. “My legal work, my career has really been organized around this idea that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. If someone tells a lie, they’re not just a liar. If someone takes something, they’re not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. And rarely do filmmakers and movies explore that idea with the kind of compassion that I think is on display in both of these films.”
Both “Salaam Bombay!” and “City of God” cast actual street children from India and Brazil. “You see how talented these children are,” Stevenson said: “You see how hopeful these children are. When you realize that they are actually living the very conditions that they depict… it just reinforces that idea that we are all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Stevenson was initially asked to submit five films for possible screening at the festival. He said he had thought of suggesting the 2007 Denzel Washington-directed film “The Great Debaters” (about the successes of the Wiley College Texas debate team in 1935), Lars von Trier’s death penalty drama “Dancer in the Dark,” and Deepa Mehta’s “Water,” another Indian film that looks at people forced to live marginalized lives. His lean toward international films is because he thinks stepping outside our immediate surroundings allows people to see universal truths. “When you are outside your own cultural environment… you can sometimes have insights and reflections and appreciate things that if it was a story about kids in Brooklyn you might not be able to appreciate,” he explained.
Following the screenings, Stevenson and the other celebrity guest curators will lead post-film talkbacks. Director Mira Nair will join him to discuss “Salaam Bombay!” and his brother, Howard Stevenson, an educator and psychologist, will join him after “City of God” to talk about how an adolescent’s environment helps shape their aspirations.
To attend the “Playback: The Brooklyn Watch Party” festival, contact BAM , 30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217; email: info@BAM.org or phone 718.636.4100×1
