On the front lines of protests
‘Whose Streets?’ tells of the tensions in Ferguson from people who were there.
COLUMBIA, Mo. — Sometimes a subject, an audience and a place converge in just the right way. And a combustible way.
Since the Ferguson, Mo., uprising in 2014 kick-started the Black Lives Matter movement, there have been numerous films about the criminal-justice system.
Not many, however, have taken a street-level view. Even fewer have gotten the kind of grass-roots, where-it-all-began screening that “Whose Streets?” did over the weekend.
“If we keep the integrity of what we’re doing and tell the truth … that’s how we’re going to tell this story,” said director Damon Davis, a St. Louis native who made the documentary with Sabaah Folayan. “At end of day we
really just need to think about which side we’re on.”
Davis was making his comments at True/False, the preeminent documentary film festival that took place last weekend in this Midwestern college town. Filmmakers and audience members were sitting in the same state as the Ferguson events, and the first two rows were filled with people involved in the movement.
“To people in St. Louis, I don’t even know where to start,” said Folayan, a New Yorker who joined Davis in St. Louis to make the film. “We always said we were making this film for you.” If we could make a film “that was true,” she added, “we knew it would resonate far and wide.”
“Streets,” divided into five chapters, examines the activists and ordinary people who gave voice to the black community after the killing of unarmed black 18year-old Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in 2014.
Its largely impressionistic account of the aftermath of the Brown killing aims to give an alternative view from that depicted in the media, showing only brief snippets of the looting seen all over TV news. Instead, “Streets” trains its eye on the militarized police presence that stoked tensions and underscored the power imbalance in the first place.
“This is not Iraq,” one protester says angrily.
Kayla Reed, an activist who emerged during Ferguson, stood out in the film and at the screening as she took the stage with the filmmakers.
“Racism prevails,” she said, “because we don’t stop it at our kitchen tables. We let micro-aggressions grow and grow, and then somebody dies.”
Addressing the largely white audience, she added, “You don’t have to think about going up to your state legislature. [But] make sure you understand how racism exists in your society. You say you didn’t create it. But you benefit from it.”
Missouri can be a bundle of social contradictions: It has one of the Midwest’s largest and most active African American communities yet has gone red in the last five presidential elections.
That is particularly felt in Columbia, a university town that is a seat for progressive causes but is surrounded by pro-gun-rights, evangelically conservative counties. Step out of town and it’s common to encounter a billboard or store marketing one of these messages.
St. Louis too is at an inflection point. On Tuesday, Democratic and Republican primary voters went to the polls to decide who will replace Mayor Francis Slay, who is not running for a fifth term. One of the Democratic candidates is Tishaura Jones, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement whose victory would amount to one of the greatest political victories for the cause. Jada Pinkett Smith recently contributed money to her campaign.
Reed is supporting Jones too and said more drastic steps are needed if social change will be possible. Some people romanticize the 1960s civil rights movement, but many told the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that he was moving too fast, she said. “What differentiates this movement from the civil rights movement [of the ’60s] is we don’t really give a damn. We can’t come out politely to ask you to stop shooting us. … We can’t politely ask you to stop killing us.”
Blurring theater and film lines
The art forms of film and theater don’t often overlap. With the exception of the occasional adaptation — and the even more occasional filmed play — what happens on stage stays on the stage.
Travis Wilkerson is keen to break down those barriers, along with a few others. The Alabama-born documentarian has created “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun,” a hybrid work that officially goes down as a documentary but, in fact, serves as many other things: murder inquiry, family confession, race meditation, multimedia stage show, film deconstruction.
The artist’s work screened at True/False, which both reflects and sets the tone for the nonfiction film world’s latest trends.
The story stems from the knowledge that the director, who is white, has about his family’s past. Or doesn’t have. In 1946, Bill Spann, a Southern black man, was killed by Wilkerson’s gunwielding great-grandfather S.E. Branch at the latter’s grocery store.
There is little doubt Branch did it, and equally no ambiguity that the crime was eventually expunged without record, let alone prosecution. Needless to say, the incident was almost never discussed in the Wilkerson home.
The artist’s presentation here distinguishes it from other documentaries with which it is classified. As still photos, quotes, archived video footage and other shards of material flash on the screen, the director sits on a stage, narrating much of what we see. Because the voice-over is happening in front of us, the feature has an intimate quality, at times uncomfortably so.
Wilkerson’s piece, ruminative in the way of the recent Oscar nominee “I Am Not Your Negro,” is founded on a simple question many of us ask about our families: How can I come from these people?
That leads him down numerous narrative alleys and philosophical cul-de-sacs (sometimes literally, as he shoots a front-seat view down an Alabama road to Phil Ochs’ ode-to-a-fallen-hero “William Moore,” from which the film’s title comes). There’s everything from Rosa Parks’ little-known history as a feminist activist long before the Montgomery bus boycott to an aunt who went from civil-rights activism to white nationalism over the last half-century. At a key moment onstage Wilkerson reads a letter from her about the Spann murder, describing the constructed, blameless reality she’s created as he shakes his head in disbelief.
“This isn’t a white-savior story. It’s a white nightmare story,” he says at one point of his exploration.
This condemnation is made even louder by the form Wilkerson chooses. Because the person doing the confessing, and the blaming, is in front of us, it becomes that much harder for the audience to exempt itself.
“A single-channel [non-multimedia] movie is a way to remove myself and hide behind the screen,” Wilkerson said after the screening. “This way I couldn’t hide.” (He said he hopes to release a version with voice-over built in, for expediency’s sake.)
When matters turn political, Wilkerson is unf linching: “I don’t want to give [Southern secessionists] a platform, because white nationalists are in the White House,” he narrates. But he mostly hopes to offer his own reckoning with the past. The title is rhetorical, aimed at his family that never bothered to ask the question, and a rebuke to himself, as a filmmaker who had gone most of his 48 years without looking into what happened that fateful day.
At times Wilkerson is even intent on pointing the finger, provocatively, at white people generally for a complicity that allowed such racism to flourish. The Ochs refrain closes with a mea culpa reveal. “Did you wonder who had fired the gun?/ Did you know that it was you who fired the gun?”
Filmed often in a blackand-white palette that heightens the color-based differences underlying the film, “Gun” is a story both highly personal and unfailingly universal. At a moment when Oscar winner “Moonlight” explores race from new storytelling angles, Wilkerson adds an important voice to the chorus.
He said in making the movie he hoped for some kind of justice or closure. But he soon came to the conclusion that wasn’t possible.
“It’s shameful; I’m embarrassed. There’s no satisfying way to rectify it,” he said of the events in the movie.
“It doesn’t have any restorative justice or power. It’s just confession,” he added.