Valentine Road

12 February 2008, Oxnard, California. In first period, an eighth-grade student named Brandon McInerney shot his classmate Larry King twice in the back of the head. King was fifteen, openly gay and refused to present the way boys were expected to; he died two days later. McInerney was fourteen at the time. Marta Cunningham's documentary looks at what surrounded both children: the foster system, a school that did nothing, a town with its answers already prepared. McInerney was tried as an adult, the first trial collapsed when the jury could not agree, and he then pleaded guilty and received twenty-one years. Several jurors said afterwards that he should never have been tried as an adult. The film records that split exactly as it stands.