4 Little Girls

On the morning of 15 September 1963 dynamite placed under the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham goes off. Four girls between eleven and fourteen are killed: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. The documentary does not tell it chronologically; it first establishes who the four children were and only then arrives at that morning. Spike Lee directed. It was his first documentary. He had originally planned a dramatic feature and decided after years of research that a documentary was the right form. The weight of the film is in the interviews. Lee spoke to a wide circle, from families and friends to classmates, neighbours, politicians of the period and civil rights organisers; the girls' parents sat in front of a camera forty years on. It opened in New York on 25 June 1997. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and lost to Mark Jonathan Harris's The Long Way Home. It also received Emmy nominations. Who it is for: anyone who cares about civil rights history and documentary built on testimony. Who it is not for: viewers wanting distance. The film shows the autopsy photographs, a choice that was argued over.