Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Black Hollywood: Nickel Boys
- Saturday, December 7, 2024 / 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM (PST)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (140 minutes)
- With RaMell Ross (filmmaker)
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Starring: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
Set in Tallahassee in 1962, Nickel Boys chronicles the lives of two teenagers, Ellwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), as they navigate life at Nickel Academy, a racially segregated labor camp posing as a reform school for children. Ellwood, inspired by televised speeches delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, dreams of exposing the system that exploits and abuses Black children, while Turner insists on looking out only for himself.
Shot and told entirely in a first-person point-of-view, the film offers a powerful invitation to reflect on the firsthand experience of institutionalized cruelty, positioning the viewer as both witness and victim. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys takes its subject from the real-world Dozier Reform School for Boys, which closed in 2011.
Filmmaker RaMell Ross will join moderator Mireille Miller-Young (Feminist Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Nickel Boys.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat. Tickets for this event will be available for reservation on Friday, November 15 at 11:00 AM.
Biographies
Filmmaker RaMell Ross
RaMell Ross is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and liberated documentarian. He has been awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, Howard Foundation Fellowship, a USA Artist Fellowship, and was a 2022 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University.
His feature experimental documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and 2020 Peabody Award. It was nominated for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards and an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film. RaMell holds degrees in Sociology and English from Georgetown University and is an associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department. His work is in various public and private collections such as the Museum for Modern Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the High Museum. His book Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body was shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation photobook award.
Moderator Mireille Miller-Young (Feminist Studies, UCSB)
Mireille Miller-Young is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSB. The former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in US history, popular and film cultures, and the sex industries. Her groundbreaking book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014), was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for Best Book on Women and Labor by the National Women’s Studies Association and the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book by the American Studies Association. Dr. Miller-Young was co-lead editor of the 2019 anthology Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital, and she co-edited The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, which has been translated to German and Spanish. A former visiting scholar at Harvard University and a current Public Voices Fellow, Dr. Miller-Young has won recognition for her skills as an educator, including UCSB’s Distinguished Teaching Award. A trailblazer in scholarship on feminism and sex work, Dr. Miller-Young has published in numerous anthologies, academic journals, and news outlets such as Coming Out Like a Porn Star, Queer Sex Work, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Ms. Magazine.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
Black Hollywood
Black Hollywood is a new programming focus at the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara, guest curated by Dr. Mireille Miller-Young (Department of Feminist Studies). Black Hollywood innovates new academic research and public-facing engagement projects focusing on the work of Black creators and technicians, as well as the histories of Black artists and stories. Addressing issues ranging from diversity in entertainment industry labor, to representations of race, gender, and intersectional identities, to questions of technology, democracy and law, Black Hollywood provides a platform for cutting edge questions, conversations, and tools for media professionals, academics, and wider publics.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.