Tag: ursula liang

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Town Hall Featuring Selections from “Down a Dark Stairwell” on April 8, 2021 at 6 pm

Join a Town Hall on Thursday, April 8, 2021 from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm featuring selections from the documentary film Down a Dark Stairwell just days before the national April 12th PBS premiere on Independent Lens.

The roundtable conversation among national community leaders will explore the themes of the film and the broader cultural and historical context of today’s tragic headlines. The roundtable will be moderated by celebrated author Jeff Chang and will feature panelists Cynthia Choi (Co-Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action), Robeson Taj Frazier (Associate Professor of Communication, USC Annenberg), Hua Hsu (Staff Writer, The New Yorker and Associate Professor of English, Vassar College), Bo Thao-Urabe (Executive Director, Coalition of Asian American Leaders), and Down a Dark Stairwell filmmaker Ursula Liang.

The film follows the events that occurred after Peter Liang, a Chinese American police officer, shot and killed an innocent, unarmed black man named Akai Gurley in the dark stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project in 2014. It examines the aftermath of the shooting, and how it thrust two marginalized communities into the uneven criminal justice system together. AABANY Issues Committee Chair Chris Kwok appears in the film.

For more information about the Town Hall and to register for this event, click here.

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Human Rights Watch Film Festival Presents “Down A Dark Stairwell” Film Screening and Q&A Session

On June 17, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is hosting a digital film screening and discussion for the film, Down a Dark Stairwell. Directed by Ursula Liang, the film follows the events that occurred after November 20, 2014, when a Chinese-American police officer, Peter Liang, killed an innocent, unarmed Black man, Akai Gurley. Liang became the first New York Police Department officer to be convicted of an on-duty shooting in over a decade. His sentence sparked protests in both the Asian-American and African-American communities and highlighted the systemic inequities of our criminal justice system.

Down a Dark Stairwell is available on the Human Rights Watch Film Festival’s website until June 20. On June 17, the Film Festival will host a film screening at 6:30 PM EDT and a live Q&A session at 8:00 PM EDT moderated by Gerry Johnson, Editor & Senior strategist at the Human Rights Watch, and featuring filmmaker Ursula Liang; Brandon D. Anderson, founder of Raheem.ai, a website for reporting police conduct in the United States; and Steven Choi, Executive Director of the New York Immigrant Coalition. To register for the Q&A discussion, see https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/register/cjjcedqp.

Chris Kwok, Chair of the Issues Committee of the Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY), also appears in the film and will host an online discussion about the issues it raises on June 25 at 6:00 PM. To register for this event, see https://www.aabany.org/events/event_details.asp?legacy=1&id=1391903.