True Justice Screening Illuminates Bryan Stevenson's Fight For Equality
Millbrook gathered in the Chelsea Morrison Theater this morning to view the HBO documentary True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality, a co-production of HBO and Kunhardt Films. Emmy-winning co-producers and Millbrook alumni Teddy ’04 and George ’05 Kunhardt joined students and faculty in viewing the documentary, shared reflections about the film-making process and the issues addressed in the film and answered audience questions.
An overarching goal of the Kunhardt's award-winning documentaries is to generate discussion on the significance of moral leadership through the lens of history, injustice, politics, culture, and art. In 2018 the family launched The Kunhardt Film Foundation, a non-profit organization committed to bringing its films and extensive video and photo archives into classrooms to spur students' conversations about the people, systems, and policies that have shaped American society.
True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality focuses on Bryan’s life and career as a lawyer with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). He founded EJI in 1989 with the mission of “ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, challenging racial and economic injustice, and protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.”
Threading together interviews with Stevenson, his clients, and his associates, the film explores Stevenson’s work defending the disadvantaged against false prosecution and his indictment of the U.S. criminal justice system for its role in modern systemic racism. Of the American justice system he says, it “treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.” His story is presented against the background of American slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration.
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