“St. Louis, I don’t know what year it is, but it’s not 2014,” a voice intones at the start of Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’ activist documentary “Whose Streets?.” That weariness comes back later in this documentary about the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the waves of protest that followed, but it’s not the movie’s overriding emotion. Each of the film’s five sections is buttressed with beaten-but-not-down quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frantz Fanon. This isn’t a movie about despair in the face of seemingly implacable problems; it’s about the heavy lifting that constant hope requires. Disappointingly, that surging energy which animates the activists profiled here, in ways both intimate and caught-on-the-fly, never coalesces into the desired blueprint for reform.
It’s fair to say that the current debate around civil rights and policing can be divided into the pre- and post-Michael Brown period. Assuming that the movie’s audience is intimately familiar with how the unarmed 18-year-old Brown was shot dead by a police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson in August 2014, the filmmakers choose not to delve into those circumstances in any detail. Instead, they profile the network of activists who sprang into action after the shooting. Their protests captured the nation’s TV screens and re-energized the fight against a strain of police brutality and systemic racism that was increasingly taken for granted.
“Whose Streets?” benefits from having boots on the ground instead of being cobbled together from news clips. Davis is a St. Louis-based artist while Folayan hails from South Central and was in Ferguson to film what was happening. The people they follow are a good mix, ranging from newly-awakened organizers like the vibrantly enthusiastic young mother Brittany and her partner Alexis, to Copwatch videographer David Whitt, and charismatic rapper Tef Poe. Each is similarly horrified by the way Brown was gunned down and uniquely empowered to fight for change.
Instead of breaking down the shooting, the filmmakers pay more attention to the protests and resulting crackdown. This is understandable, as the heavy-handed tactics used by the police and National Guard are a microcosm of the paramilitary trend in American law enforcement. That “us against them” mentality is vividly captured in one starkly emotional scene at a courthouse where numerous police officers callously flaunt “I Am Darren Wilson” bracelets in support of the officer who killed Brown.
The problem with Folayan and Davis’ approach, however, is that by not binding the story of protests to the story of the things being protested, they risk undercutting the importance of the fight. The chaotic footage captured of the protesters lining up to block traffic on a highway, and fighting among themselves over who has the stomach for what they’re doing, is visceral. It is also crucial for understanding the rage and frustration about the grindingly slow pace of reform that erupted after the Brown killing.
The same can be said for the scene at the rally when younger activists essentially take the stage from an older NAACP leader, shouting, “This ain’t your daddy’s civil rights march!” But while their fight is a large part of this story, it isn’t the whole story. Without any background on subjects like racial disparities in police shootings, white flight, and housing discrimination in St. Louis, and only the briefest nod towards how the Ferguson police systemically targeted black residents for petty offenses, the saga of the activists’ fight is somewhat unmoored from its purpose. Inserting a shot of the Dred Scott Way street sign doesn’t say much about the area’s history of racial injustice. Other recent documentaries like Craig Atkinson’s incendiary “Do Not Resist” and Erik Ljung’s heartrending “The Blood is at the Doorstep” create more powerful arguments about the necessity of grassroots activism against entrenched powers.
Further complicating “Whose Streets?” are some of the activists’ less productive approaches. The argument is made that news coverage agonized more over the burning and looting of stores during the protests than Brown’s killing. But instead of crafting a serious critique of the capitalist priorities in the mainstream media, the movie includes a clip of a young activist blithely calling the burning of a building “a revolutionary act.” A protester appears in another scene wearing a shirt that says “Who Gives a Fuck About Voting?” (Earlier this year, Ferguson re-elected the same mayor who was in office during the Brown shooting and the ham-fisted response that followed, suggesting that pushing to get out the vote might have been a wise course of action.)
It feels right for the movie to celebrate these activists’ demands for change with such electrifying and righteous purpose. But it never manages to contextualize their efforts as part of a larger strategy and longer historical arc, which would suggest that enthusiasm alone rarely wins concessions from entrenched powers. [C+]