What does it mean to make films that deal with Black death? What is the weight that it carries? What are the decisions you make as a filmmaker about what you show and don’t show? Why are these films important to make? Do these films empower a Black audience?

6:00 PM Murders that Matter (2023, 90 minutes)

A film by Marco Williams, Murders that Matter is a documentary set in Philadelphia. In the aftermath of her youngest son's murder, Movita Johnson-Harrell vows to save all other sons from gun violence. Over five years, Johnson-Harrell transforms from a victim of violent trauma into a fierce advocate against gun violence in Black communities.

7:30 PM The Weight: Documenting Black Death and Anti-Black Violence 

A conversation with filmmaker Marco Williams (Murders that Matter) and literary scholar and cultural critic, Dr. Deborah McDowell (“Photography and Mourning,” Leaving Pipe Shop) the Alice Griffin Professor of English at University of Virginia.

Two of Marco Williams' earlier films will be available for free on-line screening to all who register for The Weight: Documenting Black Death and Anti-Black Violence. Banished (2007, 90 minutes) on the destruction of Black towns and the expelling Black citizens in the US between 1860 and 1920 and Two Towns of Jasper (2002 , 90 minutes ) a documentary created by two film crews, one white and one Black, exploring the lynching murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas.

About the Filmmaker: 

Marco Williams is an award-winning filmmaker known for unmasking and uncovering the complexities of the human condition. 

He has been honored and recognized for his efforts, with awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the "Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor" in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill, a George Foster Peabody Award, the Beacon Award, the Alfred I. duPont Silver Baton, the Pan African Film Festival Outstanding Documentary Award, the Full Frame Documentary Festival Spectrum Award, and the National Association of Black Journalists First Place Salute to Excellence Award.

He currently holds the position of Professor at Northwestern University in the School of Communication, the Department of Radio, Film, and Television, and serves as a Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar.  He received a B.A. from Harvard University in Visual and Environmental Studies, a Master of Arts degree from UCLA in Afro-American Studies, and a Master of Fine Arts, also from UCLA, in their Producer's Program.

About Deborah McDowell: 

Deborah E. McDowell, a scholar of African American/American literature, is the Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Virginia, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1987. Her publications include 'The Changing Same': Studies in Fiction by African-American Women, Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin, as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and scholarly editions. She is co-editor (with Claudrena Harold and Juan Battle) of The Punitive Turn: Race, Inequality, and Mass Incarceration. Extensively involved in editorial projects pertaining to the subject of African-American literature, she founded the African-American Women Writers Series for Beacon Press and served as its editor from 1985-1993. This project oversaw the reissue of fourteen novels by African American women writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also served as a period editor for the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, now in its third edition; contributing editor to the D. C. Heath Anthology of American Literature, and co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Her service on various editorial boards has included Publications of the Modern Language Association, American Literature, Genders, and African-American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.

Professor McDowell has been the recipient of various grants, including the Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship (Radcliffe), the National Research Council Fellowship of the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Purdue University in 2006.