FAIR SCREENING - What Killed Michael Brown?

"We were not afraid of the truth and we said we would be the ones to tell it."

Hi all,

This Wednesday, July 15 at 7pm EST, FAIR For All is screening my film What Killed Michael Brown? After the film, I will do a Q&A. Here is the link to register.

It is hard to believe it has been almost six years since we released this film. Nine years since we started making it. I showed up on Canfield Drive on August 9th, the fourth anniversary of the shooting, not knowing what to expect. What followed over the next two years was one of my favorite film experiences, made with my father, Shelby Steele.

But the older this film gets, the more clear it becomes that we were documenting something bigger than a shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

One of our first shots on the first day of filming “What Killed Michael Brown?” You can see the infamous Ferguson Market on the right.

What happened on that unbearably hot Saturday in August 2014 marked a new direction in America, one guided by the race principle. The charge coming out of Ferguson was that America was so systemically racist that it would, paradoxically, require the entire nation to organize around the race principle in order to defeat this racism.

It is easy to forget now how tightly wounded up the country was during the 2010s. We had just come through Trayvon Martin and, two years later, Eric Garner and then Michael Brown. Every shooting of a black man put America back on trial. Black Lives Matter moved from a mere hashtag to a seat at the White House. Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi were given royal treatment by universities, corporations, and the media. They said absurdities that I never thought I would hear in my lifetime: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” And far too much of America lapped it up. Even the United States government twisted the facts on the ground to bolster their systemic racism narrative. Universities taught the lie. Newsrooms repeated it. And a young man’s death was weaponized into a political instrument so powerful that it reshaped the country. Worse was how much people feared speaking out. Even my father’s conservative friends looked at him sideways for saying that the systemic racism charge was a ploy, a mechanism to milk white guilt America into surrendering power to people who had found power in race.

It was all of this that inspired my father and I to make What Killed Michael Brown? My family has always been the outsiders. We were not afraid of the truth and we said we would be the ones to tell it. So we raised money and worked in the dark for the following years — and just as we were about to finish the edit, the tape of George Floyd exploded around the world.

We released What Killed Michael Brown? in the middle of all that chaos. To date, there has been only one film about what happened in Ferguson that dares to tell the truth. There are at least six that tell the opposite.

What makes us most proud is the impact the film had on so many Americans. It gave them the voice and the ability to push back against the narrative. We have many letters from people calling it “freeing” and “liberating.”

One of my favorite memories is of a young college student in Michigan. She told me: “I am part of Black Lives Matter. I marched with Black Lives Matter. I believed what they told me about what happened to Michael Brown. And then I saw your film.” She ended by saying she was going to show it to her friends.

That is why we made it. And it is why I hope you will join us Wednesday night.

It is online. It is free. It is open to all.

What Killed Michael Brown?
Wednesday, July 15 | 7pm EST
Online via Zoom, Q&A to follow
Register here

My best,

Eli