Williams isn't afraid to ask -- without providing any definitive answer -- whether black people are owed something for the legacy they were denied, and whether the grandchildren of the people who denied it should be properly held accountable.
Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America (2007)
Runtime: 86 mins
Synopsis: This story of three U.S. towns which, in the early 20th century, forced their entire African American populations to leave, explores what—if anything—can be done to repair past racial injustice. --© Sundance Film Festival This story of three U.S. towns which, in the early 20th century, forced their entire African American populations to leave, explores what—if anything—can be done to repair past racial injustice. --© Sundance Film Festival [More]
Genre: Education/General Interest
Reviews
Marco Williams’s latest investigation into race relations suggests, seemingly without intending to, how much the language of pop psychology has vitiated our nation’s discourse on the atrocities committed on its soil.
This crucially important documentary from filmmaker Marco Williams examines three cases in particular, and raises some difficult questions about what can be done in the present to make up for the crimes of the past.
Banished offers a startling tour into an unforgotten history that remains invisible to most Americans.
There are ghosts haunting Banished, about the forced expulsion of black Southerners from their homes in the troubled and violent decades after the Civil War.
In Banished, Marco Williams investigates, with even-handed and nuanced precision, the shameful and suppressed history of white communities banishing African-Americans from their homes between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s.
A reflective and thought-provoking documentary, guided by Williams' sensitivity to the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of racism that spurred those events.
Banished effectively evokes the manner in which events of the past are carried into the present via cultural traditions, artifacts, and unspoken local histories.
They say The South has changed, but you wouldn't know it from this jaw-dropping shocker you have to see to be believe.
A forceful and disturbing, emotionally resonant investigative inquiry into the sordid hidden history of racial cleansing of towns across America.
Pic's enormous social importance is unfortunately neutralized by merely adequate filmmaking.
Enlightening docu about an unknown chapter in the history of racism.
Banished contains enough insights into race relations to be worth watching.
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by: mlblanchard 9/28/07


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