Sud

A small documentary from Akerman about the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. Interestingly, the project began as a doc about William Faulkner. The racially motivated murder occurred, and Akerman and her crew skirted on over to Jasper, Texas. It is pretty typical of an Akerman doc, in that the vast majority of it is made up of extremely long takes where nothing much is happening. Sometimes it just observes people (always African Americans in these sequences) going about their lives, a lot of times the camera is just pointed out the window of a moving car - this can actually be a tad icky, honestly, especially when the camera is pointed out the back of the car. James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death behind a vehicle, and these sequences can't help but recall that, intentionally or not. There are also interviews, which are probably the more interesting part of the film, despite being less artful. Akerman has little insight into the issue - after all, she sees herself as more an observer than a documentarian - but it's still a decent documentary.

An odd mixing of old and new styles for Akerman. And while there are difficult, slow patches, the overall effect is shockingly powerful.

For about 15 minutes the film resembles her earlier cinema photo montages that give a sense of time and place only through raw images and sound, the camera still, or slowly moving past often seemingly random images that somehow add up to a coherent whole (D'Est, Hotel Monterey).

But, in Sud, suddenly there are head on interviews, a shockingly 'normal' style for this experimental film-maker talking first about racism in the South and how it has (and hasn't ) changed, and then about the infamous

James Byrd case, where, in 1998, an African American was dragged to his death for 3 miles behind a pick-up truck by a trio of young white supremacists.

We realize that the town and place of that horrific murder, Jasper, is what we've been looking at. It changes our whole perspective.

We follow the Byrd story through interviews with African-American friends and neighbors, white police and reporters, and by watching a memorial service for Byrd. As well as an interview about the white power movement and how it functions in the modern day world.

Some of this feels rough, and almost amateurish, moving, but sometimes without focus.

Yet when we get to the films last sequence, a wordless, seemingly endless drive looking backwards along the same stretch of road where Byrd was killed, black circles still painted on the road by investigators, showing where bits of Byrd's body were found, the whole piece takes on a deeply chilling and powerful resonance about racial hatred in America and the world.