Mark Reviews Movies: EMANUEL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 17, 2019

They welcomed him. Brian Ivie's documentary Emanuel reminds us of that fact a few times. On a summer evening in 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina, a Bible study group welcomed a stranger, a 21-year-old white man, into the fold at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the country's oldest black churches. In less than an hour, that stranger would shoot 10 people—eight of them died at the scene and one would die at a nearby hospital.

Ivie's film primarily focuses on the survivors—the three who lived and the family members of the victims. Their stories—of what happened before the shooting, of learning what had happened, of being in the room as the hate-fueled violence occurred—are almost too painful to bear. We must and do hear them, though, and for that, the film is a vital testimony of grief and horror, yes, but also of love and forgiveness.

When the survivors talk, Ivie does not interrupt them. There are long, single takes of these interviews, as one woman describes the chaos of trying to find out what happened to her mother, as a minister tells the story of his wife leaving for church, and as a mother details the final moments of her son's life. As much as we might not want to, we can and do picture all of it.

There is an attempt here to contextualize the murderer's motives and actions within the continuing history of racism and racist violence in the United States. There's also an argument to be made that Ivie allows that narrative to slip—once the film's own story becomes that of how some of the victims' family members stood up in a courtroom to forgive the man who killed their loved ones.

Wisely, Ivie allows that argument to be made in his documentary. Activists point out that the real lesson of this mass murder may have been lost, and other family members say that they find the idea of forgiving the killer, as courageous and truly Christian as it may be, unthinkable.

It's an important conversation to be had, although the film's own focus on forgiveness in the aftermath of the murders suggests that the opportunity for it in this particular case may have passed. What Emanuel leaves us with, though, is a series of staggering, heartbreaking stories that need to be heard.

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