Documentary Screening: "Ghosts of a Lost Cause"

A special screening of the Kentucky documentary Ghosts of a Lost Cause will take place Thursday, September 10,  2026, at the Kentucky Theatre in downtown Lexington. The screening will open Beyond Statues: A Convening on Land, Space, and Memory, a two-day gathering hosted by the Monuments Workshop, a grant-funded program working to integrate legal expertise into efforts to improve the monument landscape in Kentucky and beyond. 

Following the screening, Zachary Bray, co-director of the Monuments Workshop, will moderate a conversation featuring Gerry Seavo James, executive producer and co-director of the film; Sherman Neal II, co-director and of the lead organizers of the movement in Murray; and Russell Allen, co-founder and organizer of Take Back Cheapside. 

The screening comes ten years after the launch of Take Back Cheapside, the grassroots campaign that successfully fought to remove two Confederate statues from Lexington’s former courthouse lawn, once the site of one of the South’s largest markets for the sale of enslaved people. The anniversary, and the Workshop’s events,  creates an opportunity to reflect on what the movement changed, what remains unfinished, and what communities can learn from these local struggles over history and public space.

Ghosts of a Lost Cause is a documentary that offers a profound look at how the stories we tell about history impact how we live together today. The film is an intimate portrayal of small-town Murray, Kentucky’s battle to relocate a Confederate monument during the Black Lives Matter movement, and what’s happened in the years before and since. The documentary challenges viewers to confront the ghosts of the American Civil War and the Lost Cause narrative, and the lasting impacts they’ve had on our communities. More than a story about one monument, the documentary asks what communities inherit from the past, who decides what is honored, and what it takes for ordinary people to confront systems built to resist change.