From the director of LOOSE CHANGE Dylan Avery comes Black and Blue – a documentary that follows former LAPD officer turned private investigator Alexander Salazar and his personal quest to help undo the injustices of violence by police officers against American citizens. He attempts to follow the parties on both sides of the events from a legal perspective – tracking the court cases and throwing up the case files on the screen.

It is not only about shootings and killings either – we hear the stories of a black DJ, beaten by groups of off-duty officers at a Steak House in Cape Cod who waits four year to bring the case to court only to see himself and the restaurant held liable and all the officers let go without penalty.

We follow a cook who videotapes an officer swearing into his phone only to be dragged off his front doorstep into a cruiser. He ultimately takes it to city hall and is found innocent but the officer is absolved of any rights violations.

The film is a timely reminder of the state of the country in the time leading up to the election of Trump, where the conversation became overshadowed.

These are the stories about Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Eric Garner in New York, 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was playing in a park in Cleveland with a toy gun, John Crawford III in Beavercreek Ohio who was simply browsing through a store carrying a BB Gun (sold in the store), even the wife or rogue LAPD officer Chris Dorner, who was herself a police sergeant that warned about his violent behavior, but wasn’t believed by her own department and ultimately coerced to leave.

Here we are at eye level with the families of the victims – the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, communities, supporters who are left behind trying make sense of these inexplicable and irreconcilable homicides. There are exclusive and previously unseen interviews and footage from the ground that follows them through litigation, prosecution, and almost always, undesired settlement.

“They work for us,” says the mother of one of the victims, “[But] they think we work for them.”

I found the pacing odd and disjointed at times, and not always in a meaningful or stylistic way; the screen going to black for too long, or sequences not being as tightly crafted as they might have been. The film also doesn’t carry the mysterious allure of conspiracy that Loose Change did.

That said, there are some very moving moments – the access the filmmaker got to the families and the moments with them captured therein make this an important marker in the history of these tragic events at the failure of the system to make reparations, and its maddening opacity.

The experience is also heightened and a creeping, electric and tension-building soundtrack Tigor Polgar with additional music by Sascha Puttnam. Some moments were truly unexpected and sublime.

Black and Blue premiered exclusively on Amazon Prime as of November 1st, 2018, which is sort of a shame, since Firesticks are prone to errors, and not nearly as many people watch it as they do Netflix. It also would have been nice to see the film have a stint in theaters, but in the current moviegoing climate, that would be a tough sell.

So please do take the time to watch this film on a critical subject, made by a filmmaker who cares about social justice and the real people involved in that process, often for reasons they never could have expected, or, in too many cases, did and still do.

Watch the trailer: