Ira McKinley fights for justice and peace with a camera in THE THROWAWAYS
THE THROWAWAYS (Bhawin Suchak & Ira McKinley, 2013)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Tuesday, March 18, 3:00
Festival runs March 14-20
212-255-2243
www.distribfilms.com
www.throwawaysmovie.com
Ira McKinley has had plenty of opportunities to give up on life and turn his back on society. His father was shot and killed by the police when Ira was fourteen. He suffered through a crack addiction, has PTSD after serving in the Air Force, spent three years in prison for attempted robbery, and has been homeless and jobless for virtually all of his adult life. But he was determined to not end up just another throwaway, someone with no present and no future. “They look at you like you’re nothing, like you’re, like I said, a throwaway. And they expect you to fail,” McKinley says in the powerful hour-long documentary The Throwaways, which he codirected with Bhawin Suchak. “That’s when I started my activism. I told people, ‘Listen, you’re in here messing with the wrong person.’” McKinley went to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he learned about filmmaking at a public access station. He then went out with his camera, using it as a “tool,” a “weapon,” and an “equalizer” as he talked to people in the abandoned streets of Albany, attended press conferences by Van Jones, mayor Jerry Jennings, and police chief Steven Krokoff, and met with such activists as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a book that has had a profound influence on McKinley. He also visits places from his past that are filled with a mix of painful and poignant memories. The documentary was initially supposed to be about social justice in the state capitol, but the focus turned to McKinley when Suchak couldn’t line up enough talking heads — and, perhaps more important, because McKinley, a big bear of a man, proved to be such a fascinating character, one who the camera is naturally drawn to. McKinley has been through it all, so he’s not afraid to get up in people’s faces, which is not always the best way to try to implement change, but he’s determined to show the government and society at large that human beings should not be thrown away like yesterday’s trash and that something can be done about it.
The Throwaways is screening March 18 at 3:00 in the Documentary Competition section of the inaugural Rated SR Socially Relevant Film Festival; it will be preceded by Mariel Waloff and Rachel Waldholz’s A Confused War, a short about combating gun violence, and will be followed by a Q&A. The festival runs March 14-20 at the Quad and includes such other socially relevant films as Alessandra Giordano’s Coney Island: Dreams for Sale, Bared Maronian’s Orphans of the Genocide, Elizabeth McIntyre’s The Lost Children of Berlin, and Richie Sherman and Judy Maltz’s From the Black You Make Color. In addition, SVA will host a special panel discussion on March 17, and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! will deliver the keynote address on March 18.