Everything
Just after 9pm on April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old investment banker was jogging through Central Park before she was brutally attacked and raped. Left in a coma for 12 days, it was the infamously dubbed “Central Park Five” all of whom which were under the age of 16 and of colour who were wrongfully convicted with the heinous crime. The latest series to come out of Netflix, ‘When They See Us’ will follow the event with a focus on racist brutality in America.
A societal issue that has long been a problem across the globe, this latest perception of the case will thrust the debate into a new light. Directed by award-winning Ava DuVernay, the four part series will explore the 25-year chronicle from the children’s arrest in the Spring of 1989, to their exoneration over a decade later and finally to the police settlement in New York City in 2014.
Produced by Jeff Skoll and Jonathan King from Participant Media, Oprah Winfrey from Harpo Films, and Jane Rosenthal and Berry Welsh from Tribeca Productions, the official trailer was released this week. Short, but frighteningly powerful, the one minute teaser is enough to have us hooked. The trailer begins with a mothers voice as she reflects on raising her children. Soon after the setting changes and is heavily contrasted with the yelling of another woman saying, “get an army of blue up in Harlem. You go into these projects and you stop every little thug you see.”
An infamous but very real case of what it was like to grow up in Harlem as a person of colour, teenagers Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise will have their story told on a mass platform. Set to drop onto the streaming service on May 31, watch the trailer below.
