Harry Belafonte’s social activism Sankofa.org continues its work of responding to police brutality with a new short film called “Against the Wall.” It’s a chilling black-and-white PSA that opens with police sirens and ends with rapid gunfire. In between, audio excerpts of real police radio dispatches and news reports of unarmed black people who have been killed by police play while celebs and media personalities are shown against a wall with their hands up.
Van Jones, who appears in the new mass incarceration documentary 13th, actors Michael B. Jordan, Danny Glover, and Michael K. Williams, along with political commentator Marc Lamont Hill and more, stand in for the actual victims, from Trayvon Martin to Philando Castile. But as they stare into the camera, wordlessly, it’s clear they are placeholders for any of us. As Belafonte says, “when you have as large a population of murdered young men in the streets of America and they’re all black or of African-American descent, I think someone is sending us a message.”
Watch “Against the Wall,” directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, below: