The Interrupters

I really feel that movies like this are worth it - to see and educate oneself. One of the problems in America today are that the downtrodden and invisible people have no voice or medium through which to tell their stories. Movies like this show us ... how powerful these stories truly are.

The Interrupters themselves were my favorite characters. I wish I could see more and more movies on people who have truly transformed their lives from hopeless to meaningful. There are many out there - fighting the good fight, against all odds. And the best outcome of a movie like this - is to feel transformed yourself, inadvertently, because you've become inspired to take back your power and use it to be the best person you can be, in whatever your situation is.

I came to see this movie to learn more about the method. Yet one hour in and it's still about the life in a Chicago suburb. Okay. Deceitful advertising. It is not about the method. It is about the neighborhood. I can take that. But beyond exploitation of the pain there is nothing. The only facts come from publicly available video clips. It's about poverty. The government is pouring billions into aid, yet the only ones getting well are the state employees. But the issue of poverty is only blurred in the background. At times the audience catches glimpses of religious leaders leeching on the pain and suffering to scam some more money. They talk the same talk that was heard for two hundred years and more in poor towns. And the violence does not seem to decrease. Yet, the producers don't want to touch that issue either.

Somehow the audience is tricked into believing that the interrupters are picked from the community. But they are all community leaders. People with family and relationships. The upper middle class of the poor side of the city. So again, no help from the outside. Like the producers of this documentary, people come, see and go their own way. And the people stuck in there are left there to deal with the mess.

Bottom line: an amateurish job with fuzzy goals and dubious scene selection.

Steve James is a remarkable documentary filmmaker who has given us a series of amazing films starting with Hoop Dreams that explore some of the more difficult issues in our society including race, poverty, crime, and violence. His film on the Trial of Allen Iverson revealed the complex racial discourse at work beneath his hometown of Hampton, VA. His most recent film, The Interrupters, screened today at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. It is a powerful film that captures the plague of urban violence that plagues are cities – in this case Chicago – and goes beyond documenting to show a group of activists (many with troubled pasts) working for a group called Ceasefire.

Ceasefire seeks to engage troubled young people and interrupt their dysfunctional behavior patterns of anger, crime, drug use, irresponsibility and violence. The Interrupters are acting heroically to try to save their imploding self-destructive communities. While the footage and the story are compelling, it could still use some editing since at over 2.5 hours it is a little too long. The length is understandable since James filmed over 300 hours, but it still needs to be paired down further to capture a manageable story.

The other problem with the film is more complex. The Interrupters are fighting on the front lines in their efforts to save their communities. But the fight that they are engaged in is almost impossible, because their personal and human efforts to save individuals are divorced from a larger political reality. The film is a deeply personal and human, but it fails to address the deeper social problems in education, unemployment that have created the epidemic of violence. They are treating the symptoms of those who are already infected without searching out the causes of the disease.

Sadly, the problems of the poor have disappeared from our political discourse since the collapse of the "War on Poverty." The current administration – led by our first urban President in decades - has failed to offer any sort of serious urban or anti-poverty agenda. Our political discourse focuses on the "middle class" and pretends as if poverty doesn't exist. Poverty has ceased to exist on American TV and in most of our news media coverage. Middle Class America has stopped seeing poverty which is quietly hidden away outside of our consciousness. The social contract that binds our society together is broken. We need far more films like the Interrupters to confront the American public with the realities of poverty and violence that are eating away at the soul of our society.

Hopefully, many people will watch a film like The Interrupters and ask themselves two questions: What can I do as an individual to help groups like this make a difference in my community? What can I do as a citizen to get my government to act to make the structural changes that are needed to transform these communities?

"The Interrupters" is sad, upsetting, and hopeful. It's a year in Chicago with two different groups: CeaseFire Interrupters and Violence Interrupters. Both groups are dedicated to quelling, if not eliminating, the violence in the streets of Chicago. We were taken through Englewood, the "Ville," the "Gardens," and perhaps other neighborhoods in Chicago. The Interrupters were dedicated individuals from those streets who were committed to saving lives. They were once in the streets themselves, and who better to warn from the perils of street life than someone who survived it?

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The problem with gang violence in Chicago hasn't changed much (for better or worse) in decades. In that light, "The Interrupters" can't be considered timely, and it certainly doesn't expose a new and growing problem. But in focusing on a group of dedicated violence interrupters, writer Alex Kotlowitz and documentary filmmaker Steve James ("Hoop Dreams"), stepping away from his usual sports focus, capture the cycle of violence in such a complete way that you can finally start to see how it could in fact end.

CeaseFire is a violence prevention group that largely consists of former convicts and people who have spent time in prison. They dedicate a large portion of their time to being present in the communities where violence strikes and stopping conflicts before they escalate into violence. They also make themselves available as resources and confidants to individuals in need of a calming influence.

Essentially, these interrupters do what the police can't, even though none of the subjects come out and say it directly, nor does James imply it in a heavy-handed fashion. The people in these neighborhoods don't trust the police and fear the police, whereas these interrupters are adult role models who they can relate to/who can relate to them, people they respect.

James chronicles a year from summer through spring, or the most violent time of year to a time of year when hope grows anew. He focuses on the efforts of three violence interrupters and a few of the young people they each reach out to during the course of this year.

The first is Ameena Matthews, daughter of notorious Chicago gang leader Jeff Fort, who at one point became involved in a drug ring. She's easily the most magnetic figure in the film and given that families of violence victims seek her comfort specifically, it says a lot about her strength as a community leader. Throughout the film she delivers powerful and moving speeches suggestive of her strength, but as she works with a loving but emotionally troubled teenager named Caprysha, we learn even she has moments of doubt.

Next is Cobe Williams, more soft spoken, but whose prison time give him a street cred that finds him able to talk to and work with some hostile individuals. His work with a gangbanger named Flamo, who he comes into contact with at a serious boiling point, is one of the more powerful arcs in the film.

Lastly there's Eddie Bocanegra, who does art work with students but spent half his life in prison for murder. His redemption story proves more than any that there's hope for those who make these fatal mistakes.

"The Interrupters" explores the deepest depths and root causes of violence, enough to even the most self-assured pacifist consider reality that is the cycle of violence and that it's not simply a matter of just not letting it be an option. Many of the subjects discuss the role of parents being there or not there and how they are role models whether they want to be or not, as well as how violence has become part of the culture because of the value placed on pride and ego.

Like any great documentary, "The Interrupters" is a conversation starter. Yes, it's edited in a powerful way will elicit emotion, but there are so many discussions worth having based on what the subjects say and do and what we observe. It's really hard to capture the entire spectrum of the conversation on a subject as general as violence, but somehow James manages to do it. And nothing he presents is black and white (not referring to race); if you pay attention through the entire film, you rationally cannot make generalizations about the roots of violence.

There are moments when the film drags a bit as it takes a step back to cover the human interest element of the film, the tragedy of it all. That's important, but its call to action is loud and impossible to ignore, so much so that you want it to continue its search for an answer, or in this case, to see if the work CeaseFire does really makes a difference.

It certainly does. "The Interrupters" proves as much. At the same time, we become so aware of how they can only be in once place at a time. A handful of occasions during the film we hear someone talk about some act of violence unfolding somewhere else right now as the camera is rolling. It's a wake-up call that unless the City of Chicago or the government take an extensive, grass-roots approach to ending violence, there's no way that even these amazing individuals can end it.

~Steven C

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