Nancy Buirski’s frustratingly uneven documentary uses footage from early 20th-century “race films” to tell the story of Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black woman who was blindfolded, kidnapped and gang-raped by a group of white men in Abbeville, Alabama, in 1944. Nobody went to jail and no formal apology was issued to Taylor or her family until as late as 2011.
The film becomes a sideways look at civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who investigated the case on behalf of the NAACP 10 years before the Montgomery bus boycott that made her famous. It’s a compelling sliver of her story, helped along by Yale associate professor Crystal Feimster’s sharp commentary on plantation politics and black women in the south, though there remains the worry that the retreading of trauma in all its salacious details (shared mostly by Taylor’s siblings Alma Daniels and Robert Corbitt here) might have the counterintuitive effect of reinjuring its survivors.
Elsewhere, self-consciously arty dissolves of trees and a distracting, horribly overwrought score that mixes Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight with Dinah Washington’s This Bitter Earth are discombobulating. The subject matter is harrowing enough without extra strings.
