Netflix’s ‘When They See Us’ to be screened in Dandora for obvious reasons
Netflix mini-series ‘When They See Us’ will be screened for two days over the weekend in Dandora, Nairobi .
The screening was announced by Irungu Houghton the executive director of Amnesty International in Kenya.
The two-day event will take place at Dandora Secondary School on July 13-14, 2019.
The series’ creator, producer and director Ava DuVernay gushed about the Dandora event on Twitter.
Organizers are showing all four parts of #WhenTheySeeUs over two days at Dandora Secondary School. Went to look up where Dandora is. It’s in the country of Kenya. Kenya, y’all. The way this film is moving stuns me. Just a proud mama tweeting about my baby. Don’t mind me. https://t.co/PzOM515hBC
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) July 9, 2019
Spoiler alert: The four-episode series depicts the true story of the ‘Central Park Five’, the five young black men living in East Harlem, Manhattan, New York City whose childhoods were cut short when they were convicted of sexual assault against jogger Trisha Meili at Central park in 1989, only to be exonerated in 2002.
The story also shows how a broken system and biased media coverage destroyed the lives of the young men and that of their families.
The mini-series spans a quarter of a century, from when the teens are first questioned about the incident in 1989, going through their exoneration in 2002 and ultimately the settlement reached with the city of New York in 2014.
The show which premiered on Netflix on May 31 had been streamed by more than 23 million accounts by June 26.
FAIR TRIAL
According to Irungu the screening is for educational purposes on the rights of persons arrested, the right to fair trial, prison reform, reintegration of former prisoners into the community and the role of media in justice.
The screening comes days after the Human Rights Watch released a report blaming police for the killings of 21 men and boys from Nairobi slums. The killings happened between August 2018 to June of this year.
In the report, the human rights body states that the 21 victims were from Nairobi’s low-income areas and that the police allegedly killed them without justification, claiming they were criminals.
All the 21 men and boys were killed in Nairobi’s Dandora and Mathare neighborhoods.
“Police are arresting unarmed people and then gunning them down and neither the police service nor its watchdog agency is doing much to stop it,” Otsieno Namwaya from Africa Researcher at Human Rights Watch was quoted in the report.
“The authorities should promptly investigate these cases and hold to account any police officer responsible for unlawful use of force,” she added.