Coded Bias
Director: Shalini Kantayya Run Time: 90 min. Rating: NR
Starring: Joy Buolamwini, Meredith Broussard, Silkie Carlo
Presented in the Virtual Screening Room in partnership with Mia Bruno.
“Effectively brings to light a modern civil rights issue that can be proven with data”
– Nick Allen, RogerEbert
Official Selection of SXSW, Sundance Film Festival, AFI Docs and Hot Docs. Nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award for best science documentary.
What does it mean when the technology that surrounds our lives is built on systemic racial and gender-based prejudices?
An exploration of the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery of racial bias in facial recognition algorithms. The documentary follows the journey of Buolamwini and other computer scientists, data analysts, mathematicians, and activists to uncover the biases embedded in the invasive technologies that govern our society, from facial scanning used for policing and surveillance to automated HR systems.
About the filmmaker:
Documentary filmmaker and eco-activist Shalini Kantayya finished in the top 10 out of 12,000 filmmakers on Steven Speilberg’s On the Lot. Her science-fiction film about the world water crisis A Drop of Life (2007) was supported by Chicken & Egg Pictures and won Best Short at Palm Beach International. Catching the Sun (2015), her debut feature about the race for a clean energy future, premiered at the LA Film Festival, was named a NY Times Critics’ Pick, released globally on Netflix on Earth Day 2016, and was nominated for the Environmental Media Association Award for Best Documentary. She also directed the season finale of the National Geographic television series Breakthrough, Executive Produced by Ron Howard.
Kantayya was named a Sundance Institute Momentum Fellow in November 2020 following the success of her feature documentary, Coded Bias.
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