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The documentary, now in U.S. theaters, uses
cell phone and camera footage from people in the streets to
chronicle the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white
police officer shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael
Brown.
The filmmakers, Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, said "Whose
Streets?" aimed to present a different perspective of the
protests than what was seen in mainstream media.
"We'd be in the streets, things would play out one way and we'd
turn on the television and see a story that was in direct
contradiction from what we experienced," Folayan said in an
interview. "This film is our attempt to try and set the record
straight on those nights."
The protests led to weeks of unrest and sparked the Black Lives
Matter movement.
"The common narrative that was constantly perpetuated throughout
the media was that people were irrational, angry, violent ...
Just outright despicable people. They just mobbed the streets to
destroy their own neighborhoods, and that was not the case
whatsoever," Davis said.
"I saw a lot of love and basing their decisions on love and love
for themselves and the people around them."
The film is in theaters at a time when tensions in the United
States are running high after white nationalists clashed with
counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the
weekend over removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert
E. Lee.
A 32-year-old woman was killed and 19 people were injured in the
Virginia college town when a man ran his car into a crowd of
counter-protesters.
Folayan and Davis, who spoke to Reuters before the
Charlottesville demonstrations, said they hoped their film would
inspire young people in America to mobilize a "new generation of
activism."
"I think that a lot of times we can be very doom and gloom and
forget there are people coming behind us who are going to be
smarter than us, more capable than us and understand things
about the world that we don't understand," Folayan said.
(Reporting by Reuters Television; writing by Piya Sinha-Roy)
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