Photo Credit Brian IvieWhile discussing reactions to the images of Brandt Jean hugging Amber Guyger, the former police officer who shot his brother, Botham, a friend suggested part of what makes that video so evocative is the depth of forgiveness the act required. Grappling with that incident begs the question, how does someone come to offer that much grace? Watching Emanuel, the new, essential documentary executive produced by Viola Davis and Stephen Curry, the viewer is asked to ponder that question again and again.
Assembled from a mix of archival footage and interviews by director Brian Ivie and co-editor Jonathan Cipiti, the film focuses on the nine victims and some of the survivors of the June 17, 2015 shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. It starts with some of the images that brought the shooting into the national consciousness: Jon Stewart so upset that he admits he didn’t prepare anything for that night’s The Daily Show broadcast and President Obama struggling to maintain composure as he holds a press conference about the incident. They immediately conjure not just a reminder of what it was like to hear about the shooting then, but the exact state of the Black Lives Matter movement in America at that moment.
There’s something electrifying in that reminder, so it’s surprising when Ivie quickly shifts gears to a subdued scene of Nadine Collier making a sweet potato pie and talking about her mother Ethel W. Lance, who was killed by white supremacist, Dylann Roof, during the Emanuel shooting. Though that sudden shift can initially seem jarring, as the film goes on, Ivie employs it again and again, sometimes to break the tension but more often to offer multiple viewpoints on a subject to underline the way race plays into each moment.
One of the film’s best passages comes early, as Ivie uses interviews and reenactments to explain Charleston’s racial and religious history. As journalist Jennifer Hawes notes, Charleston was the, “premiere slave port of America,” not to mention the first state to secede from the Union and that history has left the state, according to Pastor Joseph Darby, a “Confederate Disneyland.” Surprising, then, to hear that it’s also known as the Holy City because of the many church steeples that fill its skyline in part because the African Methodist Episcopal denomination was deliberately conceived as an anti-slavery sect and represented a place where the state’s former slaves could not only find solace from what they’d experienced through faith, but–considering the Emanuel Church was the first free-standing black church in the South–express their independence. Still, even with that history as journalist Herb Frazier suggests, the city’s “past is not so holy.”
That’s especially true when it comes to its treatment of Denmark Vesey pre-Civil War. When Charleston’s current (and it must be noted, white) mayor Joe Riley describes Vesey as a “free black who had the courage to seek to start a slave revolt,” Ivie quickly cuts to a reenactment of Vesey fleeing a white lynch mob as, in voice-over, Frazier tells the more violent and truer version of the story. It’s a brilliant bit of cinema that, simply through comparing narrators, implies so much about how Charleston’s racial history has been processed by different communities.
However, perhaps the most memorable moment in which Ivie uses editing to suggest differences in viewpoint along racial lines comes when the film inevitably addresses Roof’s motivations at about the halfway mark. In rapid succession, Ivie uses people like governor Nikki Haley, prosecutor Scarlett Wilson and journalist Glenn Smith to discuss Roof’s background, radicalization through the internet and the reasons for what he did given in his manifesto. Yet it’s not until Darby reappears saying that, “racism is as American as apple pie,” that it becomes clear that Ivie exclusively used white commentators to talk about Roof in a way that subtly recalls the way that media often tries to humanize killers after they’ve committed their crimes.
It’s a brilliant moment and, rightfully, the last time Ivie really gives any prominence to Roof’s perspective. Instead, it’s the way the families of the victims and those who survived the shooting react to what Roof did that make Emanuel such a rewarding watch. While it’s devastating to hear Collier relay how she learned of her mother’s death or chilling to hear Felicia Sanders relay that Roof told her that he would leave her alive so that she could tell the story of the shooting, perhaps the most impactful story comes from Reverend Anthony Thompson, who lost his wife, Myra, in the shooting.
As he remembers it, Myra was “glowing” that day before she left before that fateful Bible study and all he wanted to do was to reach out and touch or kiss her. However, he just couldn’t bring himself to do so and instead decided to ask her why she’d looked so happy after she came back. ”I never got to ask her that question,” he says sadly. And yet, Thompson doesn’t follow that statement with bitterness, but a profound expression of his faith. “She was already in her glory,” he says matter-of-factly. As he explains it, he wasn’t allowed to touch Myra because God had already, “scooped her up.” It’s a stunning moment, but one that Ivie and his subjects repeat again and again as the film nears its end. As Collier, Thompson and even Sanders express their forgiveness to Roof in court or even in interviews now, their ability to rely on their faith to let go of their anger and resentment is, quite simply, staggering.
In fiction and in real life, people place too much focus on the perpetrators of mass violence even though their justifications are always variations on the same hate-filled theme. Emanuel understands that Dylann Roof is actually the least interesting part of what happened on June 17, 2015. Rather, it’s the victims and the families forced to work through their sadness and loss who should be the focus in this and every occasion. Ivie’s film may be about the grief caused by one heinous act, but watching it feels like a divine lesson in what faith really means.
