Friday, September 15, 2017

TIFF 2017: Black Cop



Black Cop is one of the more interesting films I've seen at this year's festival. It's the second Canadian film I've seen (the other was Public Schooled), set recognizably in Halifax, in the North End. It's also the second film I've seen this week dealing with racial injustice, with a very different take than that in Mudbound.

Ronnie Rowe Jr. delivers a great performance as the title character (we never hear his name, which is perhaps a device to set him apart as "other"?). Fed up with the unending harassment and injustice faced by the black community, and himself the target of profiling by other cops who don't initially know that he is "one of us", Black Cop decides to take justice into his own hands, and deliver to a series of white people he encounters the kind of treatment that blacks often receive. It's shocking and violent and upsetting and very wrong, and that's entirely the point. One message I got from the film is that it is unreasonable to expect reasonable behaviour from those who have long been the targets of unreasonable treatment. That is not an endorsement of violence, but a plea for understanding.

Directory Cory Bowles has assembled a piece that is part conventional movie, part performance art, part slam poetry. He and some of the cast & crew came on stage after the film for an interesting Q&A. He talked about how he wanted to speak up for his community and provoke uncomfortable conversations, and that he certainly didn't want to encourage any black cops in the audience to emulate his protagonist! Then came the uncomfortable question. A middle aged white man in the audience asked what bigger themes in the world Bowles was trying to speak to, suggesting that maybe it's not appropriate to focus on the suffering of just one part of society when there are so many wrongs going on all over (I was waiting for him to say "All Lives Matter" but he didn't). At one point he said something about the "evolution of the Negro" and the audience started to grumble. The moderator cut him off to let the director respond. He thanked the man for his question and said he did want to engage in uncomfortable questions like that one, and simply said that while there certainly are lots of other wrongs going on in the world, he felt driven to speak up and fight for his community. Then he handed the microphone to Lanette Ware, (who does not appear on-screen in the film but is a voice on the radio that Black Cop listens to), and she nailed the response. I can't remember exactly what she said, but she politely put the questioner in his place with a very calm and beautifully eloquent comment about the need for the black community to speak out and resist injustice.

I can't say this is the best film I've seen at the festival. The pacing suffered at times, and not all the performances were as great as Rowe's. But I think it's an important film that provides a Canadian perspective on an urgent issue of our time. The Canadian aspect is important because we often celebrate that we are not as bad as the US when it comes to racism (and I still believe that), but that is a very low bar that we need to improve on. I hope Black Cop gets distribution to theatres across Canada soon.


TIFF 2017 Overview

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