The Interrupters

The western was America's great film genre, but the world has moved on. Over recent decades the country has inverted itself and the frontier lives in the inner city. This violent, hostile landscape has never been painted with such realistic and vivid hues as it has in Steve James's documentary, The Interrupters. His camera is our unflinching eye onto streets decorated with dying flowers and tributes to the fallen, not gunned down in Iraq or Afghanistan but in their own Chicago neighbourhoods. We follow a year in the life of three "Interrupters" working for the Ceasefire organisation whose job it is to intervene in violent confrontations between gang members. As with his epic Hoop Dreams, James takes a stripped down verité approach and allows the people and situations to breathe and speak for themselves. It's a powerful and affecting film showing a senseless epidemic of vendetta violence, but with welcome shards of optimism cutting through the malevolent clouds. [Alan Bett]