Meredith College Documentary Film Festival

The Meredith College Documentary Film Festival will be held on Sunday, January 22, 2023 (snow date January 29), in Kresge Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.

The 2023 festival will include two short documentaries, Please Rescue Me and From the Soul, and the full-length feature, My Name is Pauli Murray.

The screening schedule is as follows: 

2 p.m. Short Documentaries (40 minutes)

Please Rescue Me (18 minutes)
Director: Kim Best
The film follows Patrick Brandt, a kindly North Carolina biochemist, arborist, and avid animal lover who has volunteered his skills and equipment to extract some 250 trapped cats — and one pet coatimundi—in the last ten years. 

From the Soul (20 minutes)
Director: Barry Thornburg
As Black gospel music moves into the popular spotlight, longtime practitioners of the genre, as well as their younger successors, strive to remind the world that it is an agent of social change and a spiritual salve. 

3 p.m. Full-length Feature Film (1 hour, 30 minutes)

My Name is Pauli Murray
Overlooked by history, Pauli Murray was a legal trailblazer whose ideas influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fight for gender equality and Thurgood Marshall’s landmark civil rights arguments. Featuring never-before-seen footage and audio recordings, the film explores Murray’s impact as a Black luminary—lawyer, activist, poet, and priest who transformed our world.

My Name is Pauli Murray will be followed by a short panel discussion featuring members of the board of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina, and Rosita Stevens-Holsey, Pauli Murray’s niece. 

The Meredith College Documentary Film Festival is presented by the Department of English with grant funding from Legacies of American Slavery, an initiative of the Council of Independent Colleges, in cooperation with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center, Yale University.