Butler's Cinema Scene

“WHOSE STREETS?” My rating: B+  

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The 2014 killing of unarmed Michael Brown by a Ferguson MO police officer was a watershed moment in American race relations, spawning the Black Lives Matter movement and creating widespread resistance among African Americans to social, economic and law enforcement inequality.

It’s one thing to talk about these issues.  It’s another to live them.

After  the Brown shooting,  filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis took their cameras to the streets of Ferguson to record the aftermath: protests, looting, rioting (whether by protestors or police depends on your political outlook) and grass roots organizing.

The result is “Whose Streets?”, an incendiary 90 minutes that doesn’t even attempt a conventional evenhanded analysis of the situation.

Folayan and Davis’ film jumps feet first into the action, recording events in the streets in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and, as months go by, examining the growing resistance within the black community.

“Whose Streets?” wants us to feel African American outrage and dismay. It does’t analyze it. It doesn’t provide commentary or counterpoint. It simply observes.

And in doing so this documentary allows viewers to feel  what it’s like to be a black person in Ferguson.

Along the way it follows several characters over the better part of a year.

There’s the young husband and father whose apartment overlooks the site of the shooting and who dedicates himself to maintaining the makeshift memorial that sprang up there.  At times that means going nose-to-nose with authorities who want to cart away the candles, flowers and stuffed toys. Basically they’re trying to erase the memory of what happened.

Or the young woman who suffers from depression yet forces herself to acts of activism, attending rallies and scheduling events in the black community.

Folayan and Davis’ approach is impressionistic and instinctive.  If you want a formal history of post-Ferguson black social activism, look elsewhere.

But it’s unlikely that we’ll see a more vital, more transformative documentary this year.

| Robert W. Butler