Crooked Lines
2018 · 11m · United States
Directed by Monica Berra, Jacqueline Olive, Yoruba Richen
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Two women — Val Applewhite, a plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case, and mathematician Moon Duchin — fight race-based gerrymandering in North Carolina.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
You'd expect a gerrymandering doc to be dry procedural drudgery, but Berra, Olive, and Richen flip it into something genuinely strange — pairing a Supreme Court plaintiff with a mathematician who draws fractals on napkins, turning electoral geometry into almost absurdist meditation on power.
Three directors working in precise counterpoint, letting Val's lived testimony and Moon's abstract reasoning breathe in the same frame without collapsing into each other; it's the kind of structural restraint and formal clarity that recalls the best of the Kartemquin tradition — document the complexity without flattening it.
The film's entire architecture hinges on the decision to let Moon's blackboard drawings sit *alongside* Val's courtroom memories rather than illustrating them — that tonal refusal to make the math pretty or the testimony symbolic is what makes eleven minutes feel like the exactly right duration.