3 1/2 MINUTES, 10 BULLETS by Marc Silver @ Kino Svetozor (Prague, CZ)

Documentary, USA. This screening was part of the One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, and took place on 12/03/2016, 22:00.

To end the day during which I had attended most One World screenings, I decided to take in a film titled 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets, loosely knowing what it was about, but not thinking about it too much. Little did I know that the film was directed by Marc Silver. The reason why this was a pleasent surprise was that Marc Silver was one of my first interviews at a film festival. Three years ago, he traveled to Cork in Ireland to present his film Who Is Dayani Crystal? to its annual film festival. Not only did I really like the film, I also thought Silver was a very pleasent, down to earth man, and we ended up doing the interview sitting on the floor quite late in the evening, as people were already drinking and getting ready to party.

So, this new film of his is the story of how the case of a black teen murdered by a white male enraged by what he called "thug music," who shot at the car he was in 10 times, and continued to shoot even as the car was driving away from him. The film focuses on the courtroom proceedings, and looks at it from the one sided perspective of the parents of the kid who was murdered. It also focuses on the themes of racial conflict and the importance of this particular case.

For me, it was a real treat to see a film at ten at night, which is something I only really do, and do often, when I am at a film festival. Even then, it is usually only Cannes and Venice. There is something very chilled out about going to a late night screening, which by the way, I was pleasently surprised to see was half full. When you leave the darkness of the room, you go outside into the dark world, and this process conveys the dreamlike state, that would of course also depend on the quality of the film itself.

In this case, while I didn't like 3 1/2 Bullets, 10 Minutes as much as Who is Dayani Crystal?, despite them being two very different movies, I still enjoyed watching it. Maybe the pacing was a little off putting, and maybe the actual courtroom footage was far too real and intense to edited together with slower, introvertes sequences in which often the parents describe their innermost thoughts and put to word some of the horrors of the situation they are going through. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed it. Then again, just a few hours earlier, I had seen The Pearl Button, and I guess I was still a little shaken from that.