A free showing of the award-winning documentary The Central Park Five will be at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 18, in Braden Auditorium of the Bone Student Center.
The showing is free and open to the Illinois State University community. The film is two hours and will have an intermission.
The film, created by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, chronicles the wrongful arrest and conviction of five Black and Latinx teenagers for a crime they did not commit in 1989. One of the subjects of the 2012 film, Dr. Yusef Salaam, will be speaking to a sold-out crowd at the University on Jan. 20 for the Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Dinner.
Now known as the Exonerated Five, these men spent between seven and 13 years behind bars until their sentences were overturned in 2002. The unidentified DNA in the Central Park Jogger case, unlinked to any of the five, met its owner in a convicted murderer and serial rapist who confessed. The Central Park Five documentary, released in 2012, was the first film to tell the story from the perspective of the five young men who were wrongfully convicted.
The film will also be accessible via Milner Library’s Kanopy for Illinois State faculty to show in their classes, or for students, faculty, and staff to view on the Kanopy site. Find information on Kanopy here.
Those with questions or who need accommodation to attend the showing of the documentary can contact Presidential and Trustee Events at (309) 438-8790 or UniversityEvents@IllinoisState.edu.
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