'The Hate U Give' on the big screen
TORONTO — The short story that begat Angie Thomas' breakthrough young adult novel "The Hate U Give" was inspired by the shooting of Oscar Grant III, the Oakland, Calif., African-american 22-year-old who was shot by a white transit police officer in 2009.
In the years that followed, more shootings followed and Thomas kept on writing. Now, a year and a half after "The Hate U Give" became a bestselling phenomenon, Thomas' book has been adapted to the big screen by director George Tillman Jr. from a screenplay by Audrey Wells with just as much honesty and urgency as were in Thomas' first pages. And the tale's timeliness has painfully persisted.
"This film will empower a lot of people and give them hope," said Thomas in an interview shortly after the film's Toronto International Film Festival premiere. "It's going to explain some things to people who don't get it. I think it's going to open a lot of eyes and change a lot of perspectives, and hopefully help people understand why we say 'black lives matter' so that eventually we won't have to say it. It'll be understood."
In a wave of films, including a number at the Toronto Film Festival, the kinds of police brutalityinflicted tragedies that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement are being filtered into fiction film with anguished and stirring passion. They aren't the first movies to delve into such stories; Ryan Coogler, for one, told the story of Grant in 2013's "Fruitvale Station."
But many more filmmakers are seeking to capture the humanity beneath the headlines, explicitly confronting the racial fissures in American society while channeling the sorrow and outrage of generations of black Americans.
Reinaldo Marcus Green's "Monsters and Men," which played at Toronto before opening in theaters later this month, has similarities to the killing of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who was choked and killed by New York police after being approached on suspicion of selling single cigarettes. Green's film, set in Brooklyn's Bed-stuy neighborhood, is about a Nuyorican teenager who witnesses a police officer kill an unarmed man selling loose cigarettes on the street.