BURDEN film screening

272 Wall Street,Kingston NY 12401

18 February, 2023

Description

This startling true story stars Forest Whitaker as a Black South Carolina minister who takes in a Ku Klux Klan member who claims he wants to repent. “A powerful film,” writes Associated Press film critic Mark Kennedy. “Feels uncomfortably current,” Jeannette Catsoulis writes in The New York Times. “If you see it, you’ll learn something,” Mike LaSalle writes in the San Francisco Chronicle. When a museum celebrating the KKK opens in the small South Carolina town of Laurens in 1996, the activist Rev. David Kennedy (Whitaker) and his flock peacefully protest several times against its opening. Kennedy tells supporters he will do everything in his power to keep long-simmering racial tensions from boiling over because of the museum. But members of his New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church are shocked to learn Kennedy’s plan also includes sheltering museum organizer and Klan Grand Dragon Michael Burden (Garrett Hedlund), who had aimed a rifle at Kennedy’s head during one of the church protests. Despite some reservations, Kennedy gives Burden the benefit of the doubt when the klansman says his relationships with single mother Judy (Andrea Riseborough) and high school friend Clarence (Usher Raymond) inspired him to reexamine his lifelong white supremacist beliefs. But giving Burden the benefit of the doubt is sometimes hard for Kennedy, who has to decide more than once whether to keep helping him, especially when Burden falls back into his violent habits. At the same time, Kennedy finds himself on a collision course with unscrupulous local businessman and Klan instigator Tom Griffin (Tom Wilkinson). Even as he and his family face grave threats, Kennedy resolves to support Burden, to set aside his own misgivings and to practice love, forgiveness and reconciliation in the hope of showing Burden and Kennedy’s wounded spiritual community the healing power of love and faith. “Siding with the angels can seem like a snap in films, but ‘Burden’ has the grace to show how difficult and wrenching a choice that can be,” writes film critic Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. The 2018 film earned the Sundance Film Festival’s Audience Award for a best drama and the Nantucket Film Festival’s Audience Award for best narrative feature. The screening will be followed by a facilitated discussion. Refreshments will be served. Attendees over age 12 are asked to contribute $10 a person. Movies With Spirit screenings comply with all federal, state and local health and safety protocols, including those of the screening venues. The monthly Movies With Spirit series, organized by Gerry Harrington of Kingston, seeks to stimulate people’s sense of joy and wonder, inspire love and compassion, evoke a deepened understanding of people’s integral connection with others and with life itself, and support individual cultures, faith paths and beliefs while simultaneously transcending them. The films are screened in diverse places of worship and reverence across Ulster and Dutchess counties at 7 p.m. on the third Saturday of every month. Movies With Spirit has no religious affiliation.