FILM SCREENING: THE HOLLY + CONVERSATION

FILM SCREENING: THE HOLLY + CONVERSATION
AUGUST 25 @ 7:30 PM
SHOW @ 7:30PM | DOORS @ 6:30PM | SEATED SHOW

FREE WITH RSVP

Presented in partnership with Manaus.org’s Equity Action Project
Genre: Film

Join us for a free screening of The Holly. This feature-length documentary, filmed during the reporting of the 2022 Colorado Book Award-winner for nonfiction, won the Audience Award at its premiere at the 2022 Telluride Mountain film festival. The film will be followed by a community conversation featuring the author/filmmaker and the film’s main subject. Signed copies of the book will be available for sale through Bookbinders.

THE HOLLY goes deep inside a gentrifying community in Denver, where a shooting case involving an activist becomes a window into the political machinations of urban development and the city’s gang activity.

Terrance Roberts is a former gang leader who appears to have escaped his past. After ten years in prison, he returned to his historic Denver community as an activist whose work won him awards and made him the face of a high-profile redevelopment of one of the city’s civil rights landmarks, Holly Square. But, as the development was coming to fruition, Roberts shocked the city by shooting a young gang member—at his own peace rally.

Journalist Julian Rubinstein, who grew up in Denver, returns home to look into the case and finds himself caught up in a world of informants, gang members, activists and developers uneasily coexisting in a rapidly gentrifying community—while covertly working together on a federally funded law enforcement operation. As the city’s gang violence spikes and Roberts heads to trial facing life in prison, dangerous truths about the cycle of violence and what happened on the day of the peace rally are revealed.