Director Shalini Kantayya’s feature documentary, Coded Bias, that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival explores the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately. As part of a national Science on Screen initiative, Coded Bias will have a virtual cinema release starting at Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in Queens, New York (Two week run opening Wednesday 11/11) and Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, MA (Two week run opening Friday 11/18).

Coded Bias reveals the groundbreaking research of MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini, proving that facial recognition algorithms have the power to disseminate racial bias at scale.

The film features groundbreaking data scientists, mathematicians and ethicists fighting to expose the threats to civil liberties posed by an increasingly data-driven, automated including:

Joy Buolamwini, Founder, Algorithmic Justice League
Cathy O’Neil, Author, Weapons of Math Destruction
Safiya Noble, Author, Algorithms of Oppression
Zeynep Tufekci, Author, Twitter and Teargas
Meredith Broussard, Author, Artificial UnIntelligence
Amy Webb, Author, The Big Nine
Virginia Eubanks, Author, Automating Inequality

In June 2020, IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft said they would pause the sale of facial recognition to police. In a pivotal moment for racial equality, and a decisive moment for how big tech will yield power, Coded Bias is a trailblazing film for public understanding and engagement with the algorithms that impact us all.

“There is hope in this pivotal moment that people recognize that data rights are human rights,” said Shalini Kantayya, director of Coded Bias. “Look what happened when informed science meets citizen activism—IBM, Amazon and Microsoft put their racially biased surveillance technology down. And I think we need to push for legislation that will protect citizens from invasive surveillance that violate our civil rights.”