LA 92

On 29 April 1992 four officers who had beaten Rodney King were acquitted in Los Angeles. Within hours of the verdict the city was burning. It lasted six days, more than sixty people died, and thousands of buildings were destroyed. The documentary covers those six days. T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay direct. The method rests on one decision: no interviews, no narration, no expert commentary. The film is assembled entirely from footage of the time: news recordings, police radio, amateur video, helicopter cameras and the trial record. The team went through hundreds of hours of archive and built the film from that alone. Nor does the narrative begin in 1992. It opens with the Watts uprising of 1965 and shows the same causes recurring in the same city twenty seven years later. The Latasha Harlins case, in which a fifteen year old Black girl was shot by a shopkeeper who served no prison sentence, is treated in detail as the second cause. It was made for the twenty fifth anniversary and released by National Geographic. Martin and Lindsay had already won the documentary Oscar for Undefeated. Who it is for: viewers interested in archive documentary and in American racial history. Who it is not for: the violence is uncensored, and with no commentary some passages stay disconnected if you do not know the context.