Maryland Film Festival Blog

MFF is pleased to present a special screening of Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns’ award-winning documentary THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE on Wednesday 1/16 at the MICA Brown Center, 7pm.

MFF presents THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE
Wednesday, 1/16
7:00pm
MICA Brown Center
1301 West Mt. Royal
Baltimore, MD
$10/free for FOFs!

Want to see this movie for free?  Join Friends of the Festival today and enjoy this and many other year-round membership benefits!

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE will screen as part of the MFF/WYPR Spotlight Series. The Spotlight Series showcases the best in current independent cinema. Each screening features a conversation between the filmmaker/guest presenter and WYPR Maryland Morning host Tom Hall.  (Click here for past Spotlight Series interviews with Kurt Schmoke, former Baltimore mayor and special guest for our 12/13 screening of THE HOUSE I LIVE IN, as well as interviews with Lucy Alibar, screenwriter for 2012 Sundance winner BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD and Steve James, director of THE INTERRUPTERS).

In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers were arrested and charged with brutally attacking and raping a white female jogger in Central Park. News media swarmed the case, calling them a “wolf pack.”  The five would spend years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit before the truth about what really happened became clear. With THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE, this story of injustice finally gets the attention it deserves. Based on Sarah Burns‘ riveting book and co-directed by her husband David McMahon and father, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, this incendiary film tells the riveting tale of innocent young men scapegoated for a heinous crime, and serves as a mirror for our times.

Critic A. O. Scott of The New York Times said of the film, which he ranked as the fifth best documentary of 2012: “A notorious crime – the rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989 – is revisited in this painful, angry, scrupulously reported story of race, injustice and media frenzy.”