Important Police Shit
12m · USA
Directed by Andrew T. Betzer
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
Police cadets get tased, pepper-sprayed, and gassed through a day of 'training,' filtered through the only woman in the group. The endurance test ends with an incident that retroactively rewrites everything you just watched.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Betzer pointed a camera at cop training and just let it run — the title is doing half the editorial work, and I respect that. Twelve minutes of institutional cruelty that doesn't bother to underline itself.
Betzer reframes police-cadet hazing footage with a final-act gut-punch — Beau Travail body-rituals crossed with bodycam expose. Eleanore Pienta as the calibrating consciousness; the structure is what makes it more than provocation.
Documentary-style cop-cadet hazing footage (tased, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, talking Hillary Clinton dolls) reframed by a final-act gut-punch through the only woman cadet — Eleanore Pienta carrying that retroactive rewrite is a high-degree-of-difficulty ask. 12 minutes of provocative endurance vignettes.
Reviews
A captivating but painful glimpse inside the lines of a contentious occupation.