The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents the first of two Saturday conversations between Barry Jenkins and Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers about Jenkins’s “brilliant adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning magnum opus.”

“An essential reckoning with America’s history of slavery,” [the limited series] “renders Whitehead’s uncanny, parallel-universe nineteenth-century American South with exacting realism. The series follows Cora’s flight—aided by a network of people who provide a subterranean train service for fugitives—from the Georgia plantation on which she was born enslaved and her pursuit by a relentless slave catcher.

Moving through five states, all of which suggest different eras from antebellum through reconstruction, The Underground Railroad demonstrates various forms of racist exploitation to which Black people were, and too often still are, subjected, along with the strategies of resistance and self-preservation developed in response. As Reggie Ugwu noted in the New York Times, as well as confronting the physical violence of slavery, Jenkins’s adaptation addresses ‘something subtler, about the psychic and emotional scourge, and the unfathomable spiritual strength required for any individual—let alone an entire people—to have come out alive.’“

Chapter 3: North Carolina

Barry Jenkins, United States, 2021

FEATURING
Thuso Mbedu
Damon Herriman
Lily Rabe
Mychal-Bella Bowman

Chapter 4: The Great Spirit

Barry Jenkins, United States, 2021

FEATURING
Fred Hechinger
Peter Mullan
Charity Jordan
Danny Boyd

TICKETS

Tickets for members go on sale February 7 at 11 AM.

Tickets for the general public go on sale February 9 at 11 AM.

ADMISSION

General: $15

BAMPFA members: $11

UC Berkeley students: $7

UC Berkeley faculty and staff, non-UC Berkeley students, disabled persons, ages 65+ and 18 & under: $12

BAMPFA’s second-feature discount does not apply to these programs.

ACCESSIBILITY

If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at bampfa@berkeley.edu or call them at (510) 642-1412 (during open hours) with as much advance notice as possible. More information on accessibility services.