Award-winning documentary "Evolution of a Criminal" to be screened at UAlbany on April 8, 2016

Film director Darius Clark Monroe to provide commentary and answer questions immediately following the screening

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Darius Clark Monroe, director of "Evolution of a Criminal" (2014)

ALBANY, NY (03/23/2016)(readMedia)-- Darius Clark Monroe, award-winning film director, producer, and screenwriter, will provide commentary and answer questions immediately following the screening of his film, Evolution of a Criminal (2014), on Friday, April 8, 2016, at 7:00 p.m. in Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, on the University at Albany's downtown campus. Free and open to the public, this event is sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute in conjunction with the School of Criminal Justice's Crime, Justice, and Social Structure film series.

Darius Clark Monroe is an award-winning director, producer, and screenwriter. In March of 2014, Monroe premiered his documentary Evolution of a Criminal, which he produced and directed, along with executive producer Spike Lee. The film reexamines, in strikingly candid fashion, an event from Monroe's own teenage years: his participation in a 1997 Texas bank robbery and his subsequent incarceration. The film includes a variety of interviews with Monroe's family members, teachers, and law enforcement officials. Monroe also talks to the two men who robbed the bank with him and stages a reenactment of the crime.

Evolution of a Criminal has screened at over 100 international film festivals, winning numerous awards including the International Documentary Association Emerging Filmmaker Award and Grand Jury prizes at Full Frame, Docuwest, and Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Filmmaker magazine called the film "an unflinching and unusual cinematic self-portrait, the type few directors are ever in a position to make, let alone pull off with such intimacy and panache." In his review for the New Yorker, Richard Brody wrote that "the film's first-person testimony is so dramatically powerful and moving-and filmed with such a poised, untheatrical, fixed-focus, and long-take style...Its images, its shape, its tone, and its implications make it a terrific movie, as well as the birth of an artist."

Monroe's other films include Midway (2007), a finalist in the HBO Short Film Competition at the 2007 American Black Film Festival, Train (2010), which was screened at over 50 international film festivals, and Dirt (2016), which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Originally from Houston, Texas, Monroe graduated with honors from the University of Houston and received his M.F.A. from N.Y.U's Tisch School of the Arts. He has received fellowships and grant support from the Tribeca Film Institute, the Spike Lee Fellowship, and Warner Brothers. Filmmaker magazine named him one of 2014's "25 New Faces of Independent Film."

This event is sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute in conjunction with the School of Criminal Justice's Crime, Justice, and Social Structure film series.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

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