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Welcome to Jay
August 31, 2024 @ 11:30 am – 1:15 pm EDT
World Premiere
Jay is a predominantly white town in the rural countryside of northwest Florida. Ask anyone who lives in the area – black or white – and you’ll likely hear that the town simply does not welcome black people and almost no one, inside or outside the community, knows the origins of the town’s reputation. It simply persists. In 2010, Gus Benjamin, a black teen, attends a party in Jay, only to wind up dead, a gunshot from a hunting rifle through his back. Robert Floyd, a young white man, is arrested and put on trial for second degree murder. The truths that emerge rip open deep wounds from the past between the black and white communities and lead towards reckoning with a dark history of racial violence that includes a shockingly similar fatal shooting that took place almost a century before.
Director: Jeffrey Morgan
Producer: Jeffrey Morgan, Alice Brewton Hurwitz, Valery Hollinger
Starring: Alvis Lewis | Garrett Davis | Blaine Hall
Composer: Jim English
2024 | 105 mins | US | Color | Documentary, Civil Rights, Local Interest
The filmmakers are expected to be in attendance for a post-film discussion.
About the Filmmaker
Born in California and raised in Alaska, Jeffrey made fifteen short films before finishing high school and with the financial assistance from his Native American tribe, the Fallon Paiute, he graduated from NYU’s Kanbar Institute of Film and Television in 1999. His debut documentary feature “Lillie & Leander: A Legacy of Violence” world premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival to much acclaim and was co-presented by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Before departing to direct and produce films, he was VP, Director/Executive Producer at Deutsch Advertising in New York where he created award winning branded content and headed up their internal production studio Great Machine.
Director’s Statement
The killing of Gus Benjamin began a decade long journey for me to tell the story of this American tragedy through documentary film. Jay, Florida is similar to so many small towns across this country that have never come to terms or reckoned with their history of racial injustices. All too often the past is buried and in many cases forgotten. I made “Welcome to Jay” in the hopes that shining a light on what happened in the past and present will bring about acknowledgement and much needed change.