EXCLUSIVE: For many years Baltimore struggled with an alarmingly excessive crime fee – excessive sufficient that it risked being tagged as America’s homicide capital. When Brandon Scott was elected mayor in 2020 on the age of 36 – turning into the youngest particular person to carry that workplace in Baltimore historical past – he vowed to take a special and extra progressive method to decreasing crime.
Scott’s effort to rescue his metropolis – and the opposition he confronted to implementing his daring violence discount technique – are advised within the documentary The Physique Politic, directed by Baltimore native Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough. The movie can have a restricted theatrical run at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in New York starting Sept. 27, and on the Laemmle North Hollywood starting October 18 (with filmmaker Q&As). It premieres on the PBS sequence POV on Monday, November 25, streaming concurrently within the U.S. on all PBS-branded apps.
We now have your first take a look at the movie within the trailer above.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott
ITVS/POV
“Like many areas in the USA, the Metropolis of Baltimore has been suffering from gun violence,” notes a synopsis of the movie. “Amid the George Floyd rebellion, Brandon Scott, a younger reform-minded chief, is elected mayor. His hope is to decrease violence within the metropolis with a brand new public health-focused method reasonably than relying solely on policing, which he feels others have executed. With unfettered entry, cameras observe him and his crew of younger leaders all through their first 12 months in metropolis corridor, unveiling an formidable plan to decrease the town’s homicide fee. When opposition mounts, his dedication to his rules places his political future in jeopardy. Will his holistic method result in therapeutic and function a blueprint for the remainder of the nation?”
The Physique Politic premiered final June on the prestigious Sheffield DocFest within the U.Ok. and has gone on to display screen across the globe, together with the Zanzibar Worldwide Movie Competition in Tanzania, IDFA in Amsterdam, the One World Worldwide Movie Competition/Jeden svět in Prague, and the Martha’s Winery Movie Competition and Woods Gap Movie Competition, each in Massachusetts. At Woods Gap, the movie received the Jury Award for Finest Documentary and the Administrators’ Alternative Rising Filmmaker Award. It received viewers awards on the Heartland Movie Competition in Indianapolis and the Omaha Movie Competition in Nebraska.
Director Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough
PBS
At a Q&A following the world premiere at Sheffield DocFest (moderated by Deadline), director Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough and producer John Benam mentioned the evolution of their documentary.
“We really began simply eager to make an election movie, like Baltimore’s model of Avenue Struggle,” Goodenough defined. “We adopted Brandon and 4 different candidates after which every part [changed] with George Floyd. And thru that we determined we needed to observe whoever received the election, to actually see what therapeutic and alter was within the metropolis of Baltimore. As a result of all people working in that election was actually targeted on violence discount; all of them simply had other ways and totally different approaches.”
Goodenough continued, “So, when Brandon received, it grew to become this technique of us following Brandon day-after-day and convincing him to be comfy with us and allow us to observe him as a result of the information has been weaponized not solely in Baltimore, however the world over.”
Erricka Bridgeford in ‘The Physique Politic’
Mayoral duties stored Scott from attending the world premiere, however one of many different protagonists of the movie did make it to Sheffield: peace activist Erricka Bridgeford, co-founder of Baltimore Ceasefire 365 (now referred to as the Baltimore Peace Motion). She addressed one of many dilemmas Scott confronted as he tried to innovate on crime and violence discount – folks needed quick outcomes, however the complicated nature of the issue doesn’t lend itself to a “magic wand” answer. The one method a politician can present “quick outcomes” is by arranging to spherical up giant percentages of the inhabitants and toss them behind bars – an method adopted by Pres. Clinton within the Nineties (and supported by then-Sen. Joe Biden), which backfired in the long term.
“I’m not naive about how lengthy it really takes to heal one thing so contaminated like a violence epidemic,” Bridgeford advised the Sheffield DocFest viewers. “I understand how lengthy it takes. And so I do know that whereas I’m doing the work to cease it, I’m going to bury folks. That’s the truth of it. It’s not a enjoyable factor that folks like to listen to. However I additionally am not going to permit methods of oppression, violent oppression, to scrub their arms clear of one thing that it created by saying, ‘Let’s simply lock all people up,’ as a result of that’s blaming the sufferer.”
Bridgeford added, “Numerous the violence we’re seeing proper now’s a results of all the necessary minimums [sentencing] and ‘zero tolerance’ that we noticed within the ’80s and ’90s in Baltimore as a result of lots of these individuals who had been incarcerated, acquired out of jail, grew up, had kids. And so if you traumatize folks in that method by simply locking all people up, trauma begets violence. It doesn’t beget peace. Locking folks up doesn’t beget peace. It begets individuals who really feel unworthy and inhuman and they also’re going to show to you ways inhuman they are often. And that’s not what therapeutic seems to be like.”
Marilyn Ness, director of the 2018 Oscar-shortlisted documentary Attraction Metropolis, which featured Brandon Scott again when he was serving on the Baltimore Metropolis Council, is among the many government producers of The Physique Politic. Fellow EPs embrace Katy Chevigny, Mark Grieco (who additionally serves as story advisor), Brock Williams, Jeffrey Pechter, and Rudy Valdez (HBO’s The Sentence).
The Physique Politic is directed and produced by Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough and produced by Dawne Langford and John Benam. Cinematography is by John Benam and Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough. The editor is Thomas Niles; Caleb Stine composed the rating.
Watch the trailer for The Physique Politic above.
