2018 Paul Robeson Award winner at the Newark Black Film Festival, this timely documentary knits the stories of mothers of black and Latin youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S.
Some of the victims--Eric Garner, Michael Brown--are now familiar the world over. Others, like Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, are remembered mostly by family and friends in their New York neighborhoods.
Ranging from the routine harassment of minority students in an affluent Brooklyn community to the killings and protests in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri, PROFILED bears witness to the racist violence that remains an everyday reality for black and Latin people in this country. Moving interviews with victims' family members are juxtaposed with sharply etched analyses by evolutionary biologist, Joseph L. Graves, Jr. (The Race Myth), civil rights lawyer, Chauniqua D. Young (Center for Constitutional Rights, Stop and Frisk lawsuit) and scholar, author, and social historian, Lerone Bennett Jr. (The Shaping of Black America).
With a wealth of contemporary footage, unique motion graphics, charcoal portraits of the victims by artist Fay Chiang, paintings by Jacob Lawrence and linoleum prints by Lin Shi Khan and Tony Perez, PROFILED gives us a window on one of the burning issues of our time.
