Join us virtually on June 5th at 5:30pm for a screening of a new short documentary on Beneath the Surface.
Last year, filmmaker cai thomas followed our director of data Trina Reynolds-Tyler as she led more than 400 volunteers in analyzing police complaint narratives for our Beneath the Surface project and attended the annual We Walk for Her March for Missing and Murdered Black Women in Bronzeville.
This short film was recently released as part of PBS Independent Lens’ Bridge Builders series.
In the lead up to this year's annual March in Bronzeville, join us to watch the short documentary and discuss Trina’s & co-reporter Sarah Conway's (City Bureau) emerging investigation into police response to patterns of missing Black women. We’ll be screening this Beneath the Surface documentary on zoom. We invite you to join us. Please register in advance.
About Bridge Builders: Across the United States, community leaders of different ages, backgrounds, and geographies are fighting for criminal justice reform. Their work has tangible impacts on the lives of those around them and together they look to a future where no one is left behind. Independent Lens Bridge Builders is a series of short documentaries highlighting these changemakers and their communities, collectively crafting a picture of the reform landscape nationwide.
About cai thomas: cai is a documentary filmmaker and dp telling vérité stories at the intersection of location, self-determination, and identity about Black youth and elders. She grew up in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood and is deeply interested in stories rooted in place. Her recent films include, Change The Name and Queenie. cai is a proud NeXt Doc alumn and was an inaugural Mellon Arts Practitioner Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity in 2021. She is currently developing a film about Black Lesbian family planning.
About Beneath the Surface: Beneath the Surface is an investigation into gender-based violence at the hands of police. This project uses machine learning and narrative justice to better understand how marginalized communities experience police violence. Beneath the Surface is committed to building the bridge between data science and narrative justice, while centering survivors' experiences. We use principled data processing, a data pipeline coined by Patrick Ball of Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), for processing data and machine learning. Every week a team of Black programmers meets with our partners at HRDAG to share code and improve their technical skills, working towards a data practice that is replicable, auditable, scalable, and transparent. Our aim is to better equip members to use data science to address human rights violations in their communities moving forward. Trina Reynolds-Tyler leads this project as our Director of Data.