(2004) 22 min
The story of a teenager who lost eight friends to gun violence and picked up a camera to tell the story of blood on the streets.
Terrence Fisher lives in a housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Before he was 19 years old, seven of his friends had been shot and killed in the war zone around his home. Terrence is not a gang member or a drug dealer—he is just a normal teenager who likes making hip-hop music with his friends. What could Terrence do to stop gun violence in Bed-Stuy before losing another friend, or his own life? Terrence and a fellow teen filmmaker, Daniel Howard, picked up a camera to tell the story about their mean streets.
A few months into the production, Terrence lost another friend. Timothy Stansbury, who was his best friend from elementary school, was shot and killed by a police officer right in front of Terrence. Terrence was traumatized by this incident and Bed-Stuy residents were outraged by the killing of an innocent teenager. However, the Grand Jury decided that the shooting was a tragic accident. No indictment was issued against the officer involved. Terrence and his friends were furious, but instead of retaliating or starting a riot, they organized protests and finished this documentary, so that Timothy’s sad story would spread to the world outside of Bed-Stuy.
This documentary contains images that could only be captured by someone like Terrence, who has spent his entire life in the projects and experienced the tragedy of gun violence in his everyday life.
Comments