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Directing Award: U.S. Documentary, Peter Nicks
Sprawling, immediate, and complex, Peter Nicks’s vérité documentary moves like a pulsing, timely thriller. In 2014, after over a decade of federal monitoring for misconduct and civil rights abuses, the Oakland Police Department hires Chief Sean Whent—a young, clear-eyed idealist—in hopes of bridging an historically tense divide between its officers and the community they serve.
Whent’s intentions and calls for transparency are immediately met with enthusiasm, but as his tenure begins, the realities of his department’s scandal-plagued past coincide with fresh accusations of brutality and harassment.
The Force captures everything; it hovers over Oakland’s evening skies and rides inside speeding police vehicles, granting viewers breathless firsthand access to some of law enforcement’s most dangerous jobs. With fly-on-the-wall intimacy, we see a department trapped in transition, desperate to shed its corrupt image but also challenged by an increasingly organized and urgent Black Lives Matter movement erupting right outside its doorstep.
YEAR 2017
SECTION U.S. Doc Comp
COUNTRY U.S.A.
RUN TIME 93 min
EMAIL pete@openhood.org
PHONE (510) 220-6940
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Peter Nicks is an Emmy Award–winning director known for his courageous cinema vérité style. He directed and produced The Waiting Room, which was released theatrically in 2012 to critical acclaim and won numerous awards, including the Truer Than Fiction Film Independent Spirit Award. Nicks is a 2015 United States Artist Fellow in the midst of his trilogy of timely, immersive films exploring the interconnected narratives of health care, criminal justice, and education in Oakland, CA.