Director
Damon Davis
Producer
Flannery Miller
Producer
Jennifer MacArthur
Director
Sabaah Folayan
Production support
Film Details
Format: Feature length film
Doc Society Involvement
Docsoc helped with Production
When 18 year old Michael Brown is gunned down by Ferguson police, activists and residents are determined to bring his killer to justice. When it is decided that there will be no trial, the fight becomes a way of life.
The activists and leaders who live and breathe this movement for justice bring you WHOSE STREETS? - a documentary about the Ferguson uprising. When unarmed teenager Michael Brown is killed by police and then left lying in the street for hours, it marks a breaking point for the residents of St. Louis county. Grief, long-standing tension, and renewed anger bring residents together to hold vigil and protest this latest tragedy. In the days that follow, artists, musicians, teachers and parents turn into freedom fighters, standing on the front lines to demand justice. As the National Guard descends on Ferguson with military grade weaponry, these young community members become the torchbearers of a new wave of resistance. For this generation, the battle is not for civil rights, but for the right to live.
Subjects
Justice Activism
Awards & Festivals
Festival Screenings
Reviews
It's a deeply moving work, and the passion of both the filmmakers and their subjects is palpable.
Whose Streets? is an impassioned polemic.
"Whose Streets?" illustrates a generational changing of the guard in the rhetoric and aims of social activism, along with a growing impatience and a reliance on tactics that can seem as naive as they are highly visible.
Folayan and Davis have put together a magnetic look at what it was like to live in that neighborhood, to walk those streets and to experience the eruption that turned everything upside down.
Bristling with unapologetic righteousness, the ragged documentary Whose Streets? takes no prisoners in its raw depiction of events transpiring in the predominantly African-American community of Ferguson, Mo., about three years ago.
"Whose Streets?" doesn't pretend to solve any problems, only illuminate those that are happening everyday. It's a documentary that lives and breathes in the here and now.
Told from the perspective of activists, artists, and residents, Whose Streets? is a commemoration of and tribute to the humans of Ferguson.
"Whose Streets?" marks the filmmaking debut of Folayan and Davis, and it's charged by its personal touch.
Whether it's the "best" documentary of 2017 is a matter of opinion. But it is assuredly the most vital.
It's likely not even the most well-intentioned and determined news crews could gain the kind of access and give us the unfiltered viewpoints provided by the smart-phone visuals and home video camera footage shot by residents of Ferguson.
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