American Violet

A small town in Texas, the year 2000. Dee Roberts is twenty-four, has four children and waits tables. One morning the police come into the neighbourhood and round up dozens of Black residents. Dee is among them. The charge is dealing drugs; the basis is the word of a single informant. The prosecution offers a deal: plead guilty and walk out, refuse and serve years. Everyone takes it. Dee does not. She pursues the case with the custody of her children at risk, and finds the county's district attorney across from her. Tim Disney directs the American film; a hundred and three minutes, with Nicole Beharie as Dee and Alfre Woodard as her mother, and Tim Blake Nelson and Will Patton in the cast. It is based on what happened in Hearne in 2000, where those sweeps detained fifteen per cent of the Black men between eighteen and thirty-four; the case was settled in 2005.