The Central Park Five

The Central Park Five (2012)

In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were arrested and later convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park. They spent between 6 and 13 years in prison before a serial rapist confessed that he alone had committed the crime, leading to their convictions being overturned. Set against a backdrop of a decaying city beset by violence and racial tension, this is the story of that horrific crime, the rush to judgment by the police, a media clamoring for sensational stories and an outraged public, and the five lives upended by this miscarriage of justice.

Date of release
2012-05-24
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (125)
Runtime
1h 59m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Sarah Burns, Ken Burns, David McMahon

Casting

Interesting facts

The Central Park Five is a 2012 documentary film about the Central Park jogger case, directed by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns, and her husband David McMahon. It covers the arrests, interrogations, trials, convictions and vacating the convictions of the five men who were teenagers in 1989 at the time of the case. It was released in the US on November 23, 2012, April 16, 2013 as a television premiere on PBS.

Background

Sarah Burns, the daughter of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, worked for a summer as a paralegal in the office of one of the lawyers handling a lawsuit against the city on behalf of the five men who had been convicted in the case. She had written her undergraduate thesis on the topic of racism in the media coverage of the attack and related events, which inspired development of this documentary.

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