FOR VENIDA, FOR KALIEF

MULTIPLE SCREENINGS IN CINEMA – Maysles Documentary Center $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price Sisa Bueno, 2026, 95 min. FOR VENIDA, FOR KALIEF is a deeply emotional film that debuts the poetry of Venida Brodnax Browder, mother of Kalief Browder, an African-American teenager who inspired incarceration reform in the United States. By taking us on a poetic journey between past, present, and future it exposes systemic injustice while centering a mother’s unwavering love, a family’s journey toward healing, and a community determined to see the end of solitary confinement and the closure of the notorious Rikers Island Jail in New York City. In depicting the community’s goal of transforming the jail into a renewable energy center, the film weaves a cinematic mosaic collage of verité, poetic visuals, and rare archival imagery from 1970s New York—a bold reimagining of criminal justice storytelling, while revealing how an individual’s life—and afterlife—can transcend boundaries to ignite social and cultural change once thought unattainable. PANELISTS 7.20 Five Mualimm-AK Incarcerated Nation Network, Inc. 7.21 Donald Washington, Jr. The Marshall Project 7.22 Michael Higgins Jr. Renewable Rikers 7.23 Kristan Sprague and Jason Pollard, FVFK Editing 7.24 Jamal Joseph, Black Panther and filmmaker 7.25. Te Be Announced. 7.26 Elegance Bratton and Deion Browder, Filmmaker and Browder sibling