Urgent Cinema: Terrance Franklin and a Failure of Justice

Minnesota-based artist and filmmaker D.A. Bullock’s in-progress film Killing Mookie is a searing documentary essay on the killing of 22-year-old Terrance Franklin by a Minneapolis SWAT team in May of 2013. No charges were brought against the involved officers Michael Meath and Lucas Peterson, who was named in 13 excessive force complaints between 2000 and 2013. The officers, using language that has become commonplace in officer-involved killings, stated that they feared for their lives. Occurring before both the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Franklin’s death received comparably little media scrutiny. In revisiting the incident, Bullock draws attention to the a history of police conduct that precedes the Black Lives Matter movement.

An excerpt from Killing Mookie screened at the Walker Art Center on Thursday September 15 as part of Cinema of Urgency: Local Voices, a showcase of contemporary works by Minnesota filmmakers who connect national debates to specific districts, funding, and infrastructure. In conjunction with the program, I connected with Bullock to discuss the film. This is the final interview with each of the filmmakers showcased in Thursday’s program: Remy Auberjonois, E.G. Bailey, Mahmoud Ibrahim and Nathan Fisher, Karl Jacob, Dawn Mikkelson, Keri Pickett, and Norah Shapiro.

Killing Mookie addresses the shooting of Terrance Franklin by Minneapolis police in 2013, prior to widespread public engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement. What made you decide to investigate an officer-involved shooting from this period? Do you think Black Lives Matter has changed public awareness and media coverage of policing?

I decided to focus on Terrance Franklin’s case because I thought it would be interesting to look back on some of the police narratives that we have accepted and taken for granted. This case stood out to me because I remember when it happened, I remember the sick feeling I had in the pit of my stomach, and most importantly I remember how the city at large reacted with a collective shrug, an assumption of Terrence’s guilt: “The bad guy got killed by the police.”

I think Black Lives Matter has forever changed the awareness around policing of Black and Brown folks, for that I am eternally grateful to the mostly young people who have put themselves out there on the front line, to demand justice.

Your project draws on a tremendous media archive ranging from newscasts to footage shot on mobile devices. What made you to decide to draw on such a broad range of material?

We live in a world of media tapestry and media collage. Much of our lives are pieced together as timelines and tweets and bursts of small storytelling. I thought it was appropriate to use that approach in piecing together Terrance’s life and the events of that day. Also, we know we cannot necessarily trust the entire mainstream media narrative about this case and others, because that narrative was sourced from one single entity, the police. It is the classic case of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie termed “the danger of the single story.”

What do you feel is absent from daily news coverage of policing?

We are delivered stories of events without context, and with a certain degree of bias, whether that’s conscious or subconscious. The traditional media doesn’t analyze police policy with a critical eye. They don’t supply the depth of questioning. In Terrance Franklin’s case, they didn’t ask if Terrance had gun residue on his hands; they relied on the police narrative of DNA. They didn’t ask about why the grand jury was convened by Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman. They didn’t examine the police narrative and question what did not add up. Lastly, they wait for cases like this to tell the story in false equivalencies. They do not take the time and effort to tell the story of the systemic failure that creates these cases. We are currently living under a dysfunctional police and criminal justice system.

The film is shot in black and white and includes voiceover. What made you gravitate towards overt directorial intervention, instead of vérité technique, for the project?

I own my bias and my imagination. I’m very up front about it. I feel like part of my artist responsibility is to advocate and elevate and touch and inspire. I think the vérité technique is more manipulative in that it lulls us into believing that film is not a contrived fabricated presentation. It is a creation, even documentary. I’m not manipulating facts, but I am leading the viewer down a deliberate path. Every good documentary does that. I embrace that idea. I admire the work of documentary storytellers, like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, who imagine with a distinct point of view. The black and white here is about contrast; it’s about the conceit that the story we are given is “just the facts”—very black and white. In fact the story we received was wrought with nuance and manipulation and bias. The system likes to pretend it’s blind to all that, so I wanted to present my education on this case in very black-and-white, visual terms. The media in the film taken from television reports and social media at the time of the case remains in color, and the archive is in color. I’m making the case in black and white.