Nickel Boys chronicles the lives of two teenagers as they navigate their time at Nickel Academy, a racially segregated labor camp posing as a reform school. 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.

Tickets for this event will be available for reservation at 11:00 AM on Friday, November 15.

This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.

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RaMell Ross (filmmaker)

RaMell Ross is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and liberated documentarian. 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 is an associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department.

Mireille Miller-Young (moderator)

Mireille Miller-Young is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at UCSB, where she 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.

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