No one could ever accuse director Marc Silver of being disengaged from the world. The activist, documentarian and film-maker has always used his work to address issues of injustice and inequality. Silver’s work has addressed issues from anti-globalisation and the IMF World Bank crisis to Occupy Wall Street. Two years ago he released Who Is Dayani Cristal?, a documentary where he and actor Gael Garcia Bernal explored the case of a John Doe discovered in the Arizona Desert, which inspired questions about migration, drug cartels and economic division.
His latest project has been no less fuelled by passion and a desire to expose the truth about injustice. 3 1⁄2 Minutes, 10 Bullets is a documentary exploring yet another tragic incidence of racial violence in America. On the evening of November 23, 2012, in Jacksonville, Florida, African-American teenager Jordan Davis was shot 10 times by Michael Dunn, a 45-year-old Caucasian man who objected to the loud music Jordan and his friends were playing in their car while parked at a gas station. Claiming that he acted in self-defence when he saw Davis produce a shotgun, Dunn’s legal team invoke Florida’s ‘stand your ground’ laws which allow for the possibility of legally killing another person that the killer believes might pose a lethal threat.
Speaking about his desire to make the film, Silver said he “thought it was this perfect storm of racial profiling, access to guns, and these laws that give people confidence to use these guns. I realised that within those three and a half minutes, you could tell this much bigger story. We then got in touch with Jordan’s parents and went to meet them, by coincidence, a couple of weeks before the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin verdict.”
Silver also met Davis’s girlfriend and his friends – the three boys who were in the car with him the night he was killed. As well as providing an emotive, fully-rounded portrait of a young man often reduced to the status of victim or thug by the American media, the interviews prove very insightful.
In fact, one of the most telling moments of the film comes in the form of a quote from one of Davis’s friends. Michael Dunn accused the teens of playing “thug music” in their car – and Davis’s friend remarked in interviews that “thug is the new N-word”. Silver welcomes statements like these that challenge the audience, and their idea of how racism is expressed.
“I think that racism is much more complex than whether you use the N-word or not. And clearly, with Michael Dunn, the connection between his fear and seeing four young black men, I think the film invites you as an audience to question where those constructs come from. Also, frankly, for a large proportion of white audiences, is there something about the fear that Michael Dunn felt? Not necessarily pulling out a gun, but the fear he felt that white audiences can identify with. And, therefore, does it make you question your own unconscious biases?”
The courtroom footage becomes fascinating as Silver contrasts the emotional interviews with Davis’s parents, Ron and Lucy, and their involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement, and the oppressive and censored atmosphere in the courtroom.
“That was a horrific journey. We could feel the tension, the exhaustion, the horror of having to sit through the trial. Every day in the courtroom, the judge reminded people that they weren’t allowed to show emotion – I presume because it might affect the jury. They also weren’t allowed to talk about race because it wasn’t officially declared a ‘hate crime’. That’s when I understood this difference between the cold environment of the courtroom and this emotional, every-parent’s-worst-nightmare story unfolding outside the courtroom that the public were finding themselves attached to – because clearly it was about racism.”
Silver began his film before the vents in Ferguson reignited public discourse and debate regarding race and violence in America. This explosion of coverage did not affect Silver’s edit – but it definitely made the film more affecting.
“I remember we were sitting in the edit suite watching Ferguson erupt on Facebook and in the media. There were moments when we were itching to go out and shoot, not really knowing why. So we held ourselves back. But actually that was the wisest thing. Because Jordan’s story held within its DNA all of these layers that not only spoke to what happened specifically to him, but spoke to bigger things that were, and obviously have been happening in the US for many years – this year in particular. All of that had already happened before Ferguson. So technically nothing changed on the timeline. It just resonated more powerfully.”