Michael Brown shooting: New video in ‘Stranger Fruit’ complicates case
(Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of film reviews and cultural observations from 2017’s South by Southwest festival.)
AUSTIN — Stranger Fruit is an imperfect documentary that still managed to exhibit the most explosive footage during the SXSW festival last month.
Director Jason Pollock provides a missing piece of surveillance footage that, he claims, shows Michael Brown wasn’t robbing a convenience store of cigars, which was the allegation that led police to question Brown and, after a struggle, ended in bloodshed.
Moments after Pollock premiered Stranger Fruit, The New York Times picked up on his new revelation in Michael Brown’s story. Pollock’s thesis was largely culled from a police report he read during two years of his own research. A line in that report alluded to a video from the morning before the shooting. That clue led Pollock to the new surveillance video.
A case that lit a city on fire
There is a mystery around the Michael Brown shooting that seems to resonate beyond the number of interviews, autopsies, forensics reports and facts, and what some argue was a “document dump” on jurors at the grand jury hearing.
That mystery is what compelled Pollock, a protégé of Michael Moore, to leave his job starting a small media company in Los Angeles and come back to Missouri (he had previously mentored inner-city youth there). Pollock researched the case for two years.
The case of Michael Brown’s shooting has been covered exhaustively. To refresh your memory, Brown, 18, was reported to have robbed a convenience store on Aug. 9, 2014, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. This was the news on the police dispatch that compelled officer Darren Wilson, 28, to pull up on the side of the road and question Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson.
Brown had recently graduated from Normandy High, a problem school with a four-year graduation rate of 61.5 percent. He was about to head off to college.
On Aug. 15, 2014, in a move questioned by the Justice Department at the time, the Ferguson Police Department released the initial video in the case. It shows Brown take two boxes of cigarillos from the counter of said store and Michael Brown shooting: New video in 'Stranger Fruit' complicates case - NonDoc:
