Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?

2017 documentary

Rating: 12/20

Plot: The filmmaker explores some family history, specifically his grandfather's murder of a black man.

An important and unfortunately timeless subject is addressed in this personal exploration, but the style made me feel like I was watching an audiobook. About 25% of this movie is a reddened shot of somebody driving down a road. Another 60% consists of still black and white shots. 10% of the movie is just shots of foliage. The rest of it is "ominous clacking" (that's what the closed captioning said multiple times), some backwards blues singing, a shot of a deer covered in flies, and a bunch of shots of trees. Oh, I already mentioned the trees, didn't I?

It's saturated in narration, so much that if there was any voice except for writer/director Travis Wilkerson in this thing, I can't remember any of them because of how much Travis Wilkerson was in there. Wilkerson tells us a lot while we look at those trees. He tells us all about talking to people, he reads us letters, and he tells us about what it's like to drive around. He doesn't explain what all the "ominous clacking" is about.

It's easy to appreciate what Wilkerson is trying to do here and his willingness to engage in an honest exploration of his family's history that I imagine would be painful and exhausting. It's a story of white privilege and racism and the stories of other human beings being cut short, and those are important to talk about. And that's exactly what Wilkerson does--talks and talks and talks. And shows us those trees.