UA Student Films About Justice, Injustice in Alabama to Debut April 23

The University of Alabama’s department of journalism and creative media will host the 13th annual Documenting Justice film screening at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 23, at the Bama Theatre in downtown Tuscaloosa. The screening is free and open to the public.

The event will feature short documentaries created by students who dedicated a year to learning how to document and analyze culture and social experience — and communicate about issues of justice and injustice in Alabama — through nonfiction filmmaking.

The students, who are pursuing degrees in a wide range of fields, produced the documentaries as part of a two-semester course co-taught by award-winning filmmaker Andrew Grace, director of the Documenting Justice program and instructor in the department of journalism and creative media, and Rachel Morgan, creative director for Birmingham’s Sidewalk Film Festival.

“Documentary filmmaking gives our students an opportunity to immerse themselves in a world they might not otherwise come into contact with,” said Grace. “To deeply research an issue or a problem, to go out and meet subjects, to develop relationships, to have frank and open conversations about the lives of other people, this kind of work required to make a documentary film is a unique experience in empathy that is hard to replicate in the classroom.”

UA has offered the Documenting Justice course since 2006.

The department of journalism and creative media is part of the College of Communication and Information Sciences.