State of Oregon
2017 · 10m
Directed by Adele Free Pham
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Nearly a year after the death of Larnell Bruce, a black teen from Gresham, Oregon, STATE OF OREGON aims to shed light on the fatal encounter that ended his life--while unpacking the state’s fraught racial history. _____ Our 100 Days is a partnership between Firelight Media and Field of Vision that aims to tell stories from the perspective of vulnerable communities and explore threats to U.S.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a straightforward true-crime lament, but Pham's refusal to give you easy catharsis—mixing archival footage, state history, and the weight of systemic rot—turns a police killing into something weirder and less digestible than consensus allows.
Pham situates this within the long documentary tradition of reckoning with state violence, but the formal precision of how she layers temporal registers—Larnell Bruce's death against Oregon's colonial past—marks a considered intervention in how we construct historical witness on film.
The decision to pull back and make this about *Oregon* rather than just one tragedy reveals everything: Pham uses that zoom-out as the structural spine that transforms a 10-minute doc from portrait into indictment.