The Cooper Union and The New Yorker present a free screening of The New Yorker Documentary’s award-winning short documentary Incident, created and directed by filmmaker and Cooper Union School of Art alumnus Bill Morrison. Through a montage of surveillance and police body-camera footage, a reconstruction of a deadly shooting by a Chicago police officer becomes an investigation into how a narrative begins to take shape in the aftermath. Following the documentary, Morrison will be joined by co-producer and journalist Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute and Walter Katz, director of policy at the Innocence Project for a discussion about the film, justice, and accountability around police violence and misconduct.

Incident is part of the award-winning New Yorker Documentary series, which showcases innovative short films from around the world. Produced by both emerging and renowned filmmakers, the series offers uncommon perspectives on issues that matter to us now. The film is streaming now on The New Yorker’s digital platforms; all the films in the New Yorker Documentary series can be viewed at newyorker.com/video.

Registration on EventBrite is required. However, an EventBrite ticket does not guarantee entry as this is a first-come-first-served free event. 

Register 

Bill Morrison is the director, producer, and editor of Incident. He has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride, and Venice film festivals. He has received the Alpert Award, Creative Capital grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His found footage opus Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be named to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) was named one of the best films of the decade (2010s) by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair, among others. His most recent film, Incident (2023), was awarded the International Documentary Association’s Best Short Documentary Film Award of 2023 and the Best Documentary Award at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.

Jamie Kalven is a writer, founder of the Invisible Institute, and the producer of Incident. He is the author of Working With Available Light: A Family’s World After Violence and the editor of A Worthy Tradition: Freedom of Speech in America, authored by his father Harry Kalven, Jr. He has reported extensively on patterns of police abuse and impunity. Kalven was the plaintiff in Kalven v. Chicago, in which the Illinois appellate court ruled that documents bearing on allegations of police misconduct are public information. His reporting first brought the police shooting of Laquan McDonald to public attention; and he co-produced 16 Shots, an Emmy Award-winning documentary on the McDonald case. His 2016 series “Code of Silence” in The Intercept exposed the criminal activities of a team of corrupt Chicago officers operating in public housing and has contributed to the exonerations of 183 individuals. Among the national awards he has received are the 2015 George Polk Award for Local Reporting, the 2016 Ridenhour Courage Prize, the 2017 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. The Invisible Institute received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and 2024 Pulitzer Prizes for Local Reporting and Audio Reporting.

As the director of policy, Walter Katz leads the Innocence Project’s policy department, which works with policymakers and partner organizations to develop and drive advocacy efforts at the federal and state levels to ensure that the criminal legal system is equitable, accurate, and reliable, and that law, policy, and practice do not compromise the quality of justice or lead to the conviction of innocent people. Katz is a former public defender who has focused most of his career on improving the accountability of the criminal justice system and has held leadership roles in police oversight, local government, and philanthropy. Throughout his career, he has come back to righting and preventing wrongful convictions, from post-conviction litigation related to the LAPD Rampart CRASH scandal to developing risk management protocols while with the City of Chicago. His advocacy leadership helped lead to the passage of police accountability legislation, including decertification laws and traffic stop data collection requirements, in states across the country. Walter was a 2020 Open Society Foundation Leadership in Government Fellow. His legal scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review Forum and the SMU Law Review. He has written about the intersection of racial, criminal, and economic justice in the Los Angeles Review of Books and for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.