The massacre leads part of a film about the transcendence of intolerance

“We found one of the most gentle, kind and generous people in this community,” Bhuiyan said. “They had the opportunity to respond to evil with evil, to anger with anger, but they chose not to. It’s powerful. Buffalo has shown how resilient and strong it is by not don’t answer that way.”

Buffalo was one of 14 cities in the United States and Canada that Bhuiyan, who lives in Seattle, visited for the film “Pain and Peace” – most of them the scene of a mass shooting. The 86-minute documentary, which Bhuiyan said extols “the power of healing, empathy and forgiveness, while transcending intolerance and hatred,” will be screened Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at the North Park Theater, followed by a round table. Free tickets to the event, co-sponsored by the Buffalo Community Health Center, can be found at worldwithouthate/screening.org

“We are truly honored to host this special screening on the second anniversary of the Buffalo Tops shooting to honor the lives we lost, the survivors, and to reflect on the resilience of the community,” Bhuiyan said . “We hope this event will remind people of the impact of hate on a peaceful and loving community and also how love and humanity have triumphed over division and chaos.”

Garnell Whitfield, the former city fire commissioner whose mother, Ruth, was one of 10 people killed that day in the supermarket by a white supremacist, appears in the film. So is LaVonne Ansari, CEO and executive director of the Buffalo Community Health Center, which opened its doors to everyone after the mass shooting.

The film also includes three Tops employees – Patrick Patterson and Carleton Stevenson, who risked their lives to save others while the shooter was gunning people down, and Angelica McIver, who arrived for her shift at the time of the shooting.

Whitfield has not seen the film and does not clearly remember what he said to the filmmaker. But the frequency of mass killings in the United States, often carried out by white supremacists, is deeply disturbing, he said.

“Mass shootings were an aberration. Something you couldn’t even handle, but, like anything, you acclimate,” Whitfield said. “You tend to accept things as the new normal, often resetting the bar, rather than adhering to a norm. It’s no longer as disconcerting as it would have been, and it prevents us from doing anything thing.”

Whitfield travels the country advocating for gun control, noting that “the root of all of this is white supremacy and white nationalism, and the vitriol and hatred associated with it.”

“The truth is that black people have lived with racism and discrimination their entire lives,” Whitfield said. “This is a much larger issue than 5/14. There is a clear connection between what is happening in our community and what has been done to this community, and we need to recognize that.”

Bhuiyan, who worked as a producer on the 2018 short film “Bearing Witness,” about the Rohingya genocide, grew up in Bangladesh and fulfilled his wish to become a pilot in the Bangladesh Air Force.

The desire to study computer science in the United States took him to New York at age 24, then to Dallas, where he worked at a gas station shortly after the September 11 attacks. That’s when a man walked in and pointed a double-barreled shotgun at him, asked him “Where are you from” and pulled the trigger at point blank range.

Bhuiyan did not yet know that his attacker had already killed two Muslims and was seeking to kill another.

“I was shot in the right side of my face and skull,” Bhuiyan said. “I was still standing and saw him point the shotgun at my face again, so I thought I must look dying and I fell to the ground.”

He was taken by ambulance to a private hospital, promising God that if he was given a chance to live, he would help others.

The next morning, Bhuiyan was discharged from the hospital and had to arrange his own treatments due to his inability to pay for hospital care.

“Being shot in the face was the first part of my American nightmare, and getting kicked out of the hospital was the second part,” he said.

Bhuiyan underwent several eye surgeries, losing his right eye, and his face and skull still bear more than three dozen pellets from the gunshot, he said.

“I lost my fiancée in Bangladesh, but I earned over $60,000 in medical bills,” he said. “I know what it means to wake up every day with the wounds of hatred etched on me.”

Seeing a rise in extremism and hate violence against Asians, blacks, Jews, Muslims and others, Bhuiyan said, made him want to know what drives people to such levels of hatred.

Bhuiyan went through a period of reconciliation and forgiveness that led him to launch an unsuccessful campaign to have his attacker, Mark Stroman, spared from death row.

Stroman renounced his white supremacist views and befriended Bhuiyan before his death.

“He underwent a transformation because of the mercy, love and forgiveness shown to him,” Bhuiyan said, adding that a family member of one of the two killed also contributed to countryside.

The film, Bhuiyan said, aimed to “further explore the root causes of all kinds of hatred and the depth of forgiveness.”

“Our goal was not just to get a seal of forgiveness,” he said. “It was to show what happened. If you never find forgiveness, that’s okay, as long as you can find peace with your pain.”

Whitfield said the issue of forgiveness for what happened at Tops was something he preferred to keep private.

“That said, my opinion on the death penalty is that as a believer in God, it is wrong to kill,” he said. “And if it’s wrong to kill, it’s wrong to kill. The second reason is that, like every other law known to man, it has always been applied disproportionately to black people.

“As a believer, I must also forgive,” Whitfield said. “This does not mean that I forget or forgive white supremacist policies or ideas. None of those things deserve my forgiveness.”

Whitfield said he never focused on the killer.

“What concerns me are all the things that caused him to do what he did,” he said. “These things are alive and well and that’s what we need to focus on.”