New films tackle racially charged tension, violence
Movies hit home in Charlottesville’s wake
As the nation comes to grips with a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday that left three dead and dozens injured, three films are examining racially charged violence throughout U.S. history.
Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit (now playing in theaters nationwide) revisits the city’s July 1967 riots and a harrowing incident at the Algiers Motel, where white police officers intimidated and killed three black men. Whose Streets?, a documentary (now playing in 19 cities nationwide, expands wider throughout August and September), uses a mix of smartphone footage and social media posts to chronicle the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 and the peaceful efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement.
And Gook, a low-key blackand-white drama that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January (in theaters Friday in Los Angeles, expands to 18 cities nationwide Aug. 25), depicts the unlikely friendship between a precocious black girl and two Korean-American shop owners, set against the backdrop of the Rodney King beating and 1992 L.A. riots. Twilight actor Justin Chon, who wrote, directed and stars in the film, believes the timing of these movies’ releases couldn’t be more apt.
Racism and police brutality are “still happening — that’s why I think it resonates,” Chon says.
Plus, “these are differing perspectives from differing ethnicities, and they’re all important.” (Bigelow is white; Whose Streets? codirectors Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis are black.) “They all need to exist because everybody needs to be at the table having a conversation with one another.”
Gook was partially inspired by Chon’s own father, a Korean immigrant who ran a wholesale shoe store in Paramount, Calif. Chon was 11 at the time of the L.A. riots and experienced it much like his character in the film, Eli, through radio and news broadcasts, and seeing billows of smoke from fiery protests off in the distance.
“I really wanted to tell a story on the street level (about) the relationships that were happening that day, rather than the actual rioting,” Chon says. “You can always watch a documentary to see the facts. ... (For) my family, having experienced the riots, it was very much like impending doom.”
The film is unique in that it explores black and Korean tensions, rather than racism of whites against African- or Asian-Americans. The title is commonly known as an ethnic slur, but actually comes from the Korean “Mi Gook,” whose direct translation is “beautiful country.”
“We’re calling America a beautiful country, yet they use part of that word as a racial slur,” Chon says. The title is “meant to be an educational opportunity. It’s not meant to drive hate.”
Folayan similarly wants to create understanding through Whose Streets?, which she began filming in Ferguson a month after Brown, an unarmed black teen, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. The film goes inside the homes and meeting rooms of activists, aiming to give them a humanity that’s not often shown on TV.
“One of our main objectives was to do an antidote to the misin-
formation that was spread in the national media” during the Ferguson protests, Folayan says. “It just seemed like it was only fueling the flames of misunderstanding, ignorance and confusion, to characterize this whole community as looters and rioters, and not to get to the emotional charge of what’s there on the ground.”
If Whose Streets? enters the Oscar race as some pundits predict, it will join other recent nominees including Selma, 13th and I Am Not Your Negro that have explored America’s complicated history of racial discrimination. Another awards hopeful this year is Detroit, which has been praised by critics for its tense and visceral re-creation of the atrocities inflicted against a group of young black men and white women by racist cops.
But the drama, a box office disappointment with just $13.3 million since late last month, also has drawn criticism from scholars and Detroit natives accusing Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal of gratuitous violence and turning a tragedy into entertainment. Bigelow and Boal declined USA TODAY’s requests for interviews.
The controversy around Detroit signals a broader issue of sensitivity that all filmmakers, black and white, face when depicting racial violence onscreen.
“The question is, how do you tell these stories without using black people and black bodies as an instrument for some higher purpose? Not limiting them to their victimhood, but honoring their abilities to actually speak, act (and) think for themselves,” Folayan says. “It’s a way we’re conditioned, to think of black people as subjects and objects, and not people, necessarily, for whom we should put ourselves in their shoes and see their agency.”
“One of our main objectives was to do an antidote to the misinformation that was spread in the national media.”
Sabaah Folayan, co-director of Whose Streets?