Brown shooting: citizen journalists subvert official version
version, which pitted demonstrators against cops.
Film-makers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis subvert that narrative in Whose Streets? in which they knit together participants’ recollections, phone footage, social media posts and present-day testimony into a riveting street-level account, not only of Ferguson’s days of rage, but the decades of marginalisation and mistreatment that led up to them.
After recalling what they were doing that day – coming home from church, going to work, doing errands, kayaking – the Ferguson residents recount the pain and outrage of Brown’s multiple gunshot wounds, and the way his body lay in the street for four hours.
From there, the film plunges viewers into a first-hand experience of the spontaneous organising of meetings and protests. Although news reports presented police use of rubber bullets and tear gas as justifiable responses to increasingly volatile crowds, Whose Streets? offers a useful alternative view, with citizen journalists capturing what look like unprovoked attacks on demonstrators by law enforcement officers woefully unprepared or unwilling to de-escalate sensitive situations and engage.
Whose Streets? – edited with superb sensitivity by Christopher McNabb – continues through the aftermath of Brown’s death and into the outrage that ensued after the officer who killed him wasn’t indicted. Grass roots activists are seen fomenting the nascent Black Lives Matter movement while caring for children, pursuing degrees and holding down jobs.
Whose Streets? ends on a defiantly optimistic note, as a new generation prepares to take on the fight for political rights, social space and psychic wholeness denied through what one observer calls an “unseen war” of misunderstanding, intimidation and impunity.