Hooks Institute Film Duty of the Hour to Screen at Nashville Film Festival April 20 and 25

Contact: Daphene McFerren
901.678.3974
drmcferren@memphis.edu

April 15, 2015 - Duty of the Hour, a film on the life of the late civil rights activist icon and native Memphian Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks,will screen as part of the 2015 Nashville Film Festival. Duty of the Hour is under consideration for the Tennessee First Award. This award is presented to outstanding films created by Tennesseans or filmed in Tennessee.

The film is scheduled for two separate screenings at the Green Hills Cinema, 3815 Green Hills Village Dr., in Nashville. The first showing will be Monday, April 20, at 5:30 p.m. (Theater 16) and a second on Saturday, April 25, at 1:15 p.m. (Theater 5).

Duty of the Hour is the first documentary to explore the life of civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks and his dramatic intersection with many defining historical moments in the American civil rights movement. The film explores his journey from the segregated backstreets of south Memphis during the Great Depression, the Memphis "reign of terror" on the black community, WWII and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination to the accession of Hooks to the grand stage of American public life. The story of Hooks is an exploration of this nation's long, complex and difficult history of race in America. It is also the story of how this nation was and can be transformed by committed visionaries like Hooks.

Daphene R. McFerren, director of the Hooks Institute, was the executive producer of the film. Reece L. Auguiste, a former visiting professor in the U of M's Department of Communication and now a faculty member at the University of Colorado, was the co-producer, director and writer. Tony Dancy, a Nashville filmmaker, was co-producer, director and editor. Julian Bond, noted civil rights activist and narrator for the award-winning documentary Eyes on the Prize, was the film's narrator.