Events

Watson Events

CANCELED: Boxing Gym Screening and Conversation with Director, Frederick Wiseman

Thursday, April 2, 2020

6 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. (Doors open at 5:30 p.m.)

Martinos Auditorium, Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, 154 Angell Street

For up-to-date, campus-wide information, please visit the University’s COVID-19 Updates website.

This event is part of the new John F. Kennedy Jr. Initiative for Documentary Film and Social Progress, an effort to bring film and filmmakers to the University with the goal of shedding light on some of the most urgent, challenging, and complex issues facing society through the prism of documentary.

Join director, producer, editor, Frederick Wiseman, for a conversation and Q&A on the making of the film following the screening.

The subject of the film is an Austin, Texas institution, Lord's Gym, which was founded over twenty years ago by Richard Lord, a former professional boxer. A wide variety of people of all ages, races, ethnicities and social classes train at the gym: men, women, children, doctors, lawyers, judges, business men and women, immigrants, professional boxers and people who want to become professional boxers alongside amateurs who love the sport and teenagers who are trying to develop strength and assertiveness. The gym is an example of the American “melting pot” where people meet, talk, and train.

Watch the official trailer here: BOXING GYM

For more information about Frederick Wiseman and his films please visit Zipporah Films.

Canceled Events

Mr. Wiseman is a film and theatre director of 43 films, primarily focusing on American institutions. In 2019, he was the honoree of the Library Lions Award from the New York Public Library and received the Pennebaker Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. In 2018, he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. In 2016, he received an Honorary Award for lifetime achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Directors. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won numerous awards, including four Emmys. In recent years, he directed The Belle of Amherst, Beckett’s Happy Days in Paris and Vasily Grossman’s The Last Letter at the Comédie Française in Paris and Theatre for a New Audience in New York. A ballet inspired by his first film, TITICUT FOLLIES (1967), premiered at the New York University Skirball Theater in 2017.