An intriguing and well-executed attempt to supply something Americans were denied in 2014, Roee Messinger's American Trial: The Eric Garner Story uses non-actors and real community members to imagine a trial that Staten Island grand jurors inexplicably refused to hold: In this conjured reality, unlike our own, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo is indicted for reckless manslaughter and first-degree strangulation in the killing of unarmed New Yorker Eric Garner.
Rather than seeking emotional satisfaction with an impassioned screed against injustice, the film conceives both a prosecution and a vigorous defense —a strategy that makes this experiment affecting, despite limited production resources and the six years that have passed since Garner's.
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