Free movie screenings, free popcorn, free coffee & free conversation. Every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month, we screen movies about issues that are important to our Skid Row and downtown community at the #skidrowmuseum.
“Dramatic Escape” – directed by Nick Quested
Running time: 1h 34m
“Dramatic Escape” follows inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York State, as they attempt to mount a production of “A Few Good Men”. Tracing the inmates' steps from auditions through their curtain call, we witness their journey - as individuals and as an ensemble. All of the obstacles involved with putting on a stage production on the outside become all the more difficult behind bars. Hear the inmates' stories and candid retelling of the crimes that landed them in prison. Witness their everyday struggle with what they have done and listen as they contemplate whether redemption is ever achievable either to themselves or to the outside world.
About Los Angeles Poverty Department
Currently celebrating its 32nd year, Los Angeles Poverty Department was the first ongoing arts initiative on Skid Row. LAPD creates performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities. LAPD’s works express the realities, hopes, dreams, and rights of people who live and work in L.A.'s Skid Row. LAPD has created projects with communities throughout the US and in The Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Bolivia. LAPD’s Skid Row History Museum and Archive project is supported with funding from the Surdna Foundation.
About Skid Row History Museum and Archive
The Skid Row History Museum & Archive operates as an archive, exhibition, and performance and meeting space curated by LAPD. It foregrounds the distinctive artistic and historical consciousness of Skid Row, a 40-year-old social experiment. The Skid Row History Museum & Archive functions as a means for exploring the mechanics of displacement in an age of immense income inequality, by mining a neighborhood’s activist history and amplifying effective community strategies. Exhibitions focus on grassroots strategies that have preserved the neighborhood from successive threats of gentrification and displacement, to be studied for current adaptation and use.