The School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s is hosting a free watch party for undergraduate & graduate students, faculty, staff and their family, friends and community members at The Screening Room for Black History Month. Join us as we screen Dear Jackie, a cinematic letter to Jackie Robinson, the first African American player in Major League Baseball and a civil rights activist who broke the colour barrier when he joined the minor-league Montreal Royals in 1946. For a short time, the impossible seemed possible in a segregated North America. But did Montrealers use this historic moment to perpetuate a myth of a post-racial society?

Through eloquent interviews, archival footage, and powerful vérité moments shot in lustrous black and white, director Henri Pardo masterfully threads together fragments of the past with the present-day realities of Little Burgundy, once known as the “Harlem of the North”. DEAR JACKIE unfolds as an intimate correspondence with Robinson that unravels the myth of a post-racial society, and is a testament to the triumphs and resilience of a community whose stories reveal the insidious racial inequalities in Montreal and Quebec as a whole.

Please reserve tickets in advance. Cash donations for Kingston’s Roots and Wings: https://opirgkingston.org/rootsandwings/ will be collected at the door.