Director Nancy Buirski To Make ‘The Rape of Recy Taylor’Posted by Wilson Morales
April 25, 2016
Director/Producer Nancy Buirski will next direct ‘The Rape of Recy Taylor,’ the true story of the 24-year-old wife and mother Recy Taylor who was gang raped in Abbeville, Ala., by seven white men in 1944. This story predates the Loving family story by a decade. Buirski’s documentary, The Loving Story, appeared on HBO, garnered Emmy and Peabody Awards, was short-listed for the Academy Award, and turned into Jeff Nichols’ feature film Loving, which will have its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. That film stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga.
Buirski’s company Augusta Films will produce The Rape of Recy Taylor with Beth Hubbard. Laurens Grant is a Consulting Producer and Danielle McGuire, author of At the Dark End of the Street, will also consult. Emma Tillinger Kosskoff is an Executive Producer. Augusta is in talks with HBO Documentary Films about the project; it will be produced in association with Transform Films.
The Rape of Recy Taylor is the epic story of sexual violence in Jim Crow South. It is the little-known story of courageous black women who waged war to take back their bodies and their dignity, and whose vocal protests helped inspire the Civil Rights Movement 10 years later. Boldly speaking up against her rapists and putting her life and that of her family’s in grave danger, Recy Taylor attracted the attention of the NAACP and their chief investigator Rosa Parks. Parks, commonly believed to be a tired seamstress who refused to give up her seat on the bus in 1955 triggering the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was, in fact, an activist, working for years to undo years of criminal rapes and physical abuse against black women.
Recy Taylor’s story anticipates that of the Loving’s, whose famous Supreme Court case Loving v. VA overturned all anti-miscegenation statutes in the country and paved the way for recent marriage equality rulings.
