When filmmaker Marilyn Ness arrived with her crew to Baltimore in late 2014, she planned to document the systemic factors underlying the recent spate of high-profile deaths of African Americans in police custody. While these tragedies rocked cities from Sanford, Florida, to Ferguson, Missouri, Ness selected Baltimore because it “hadn't had a cataclysm like that,” she tells RECORD. She hoped that would allow her film to illuminate the broader issues, rather than viewing the issues through the lens of a single incident. But then, on April 12, 2015, Baltimore joined those cities and others in the headlines, when 25-year-old Freddie Gray died while in police custody, touching off protests, riots, and cries for justice.
Other filmmakers might have pivoted, but Ness had done the groundwork for a specific film. So for the next year she waited out the storm. What she found was that “the world stayed exactly the same for our community members and our police officers once the dust had settled,” she says. “So that became our tension—grappling with what happens before and after.” Ness and her team were able to stick with the original premise of investigating the simmering factors in a community that can eventually boil over into violence.
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