They Won’t Call It Murder
2022 · 20m
Directed by Ingrid Raphaël, Melissa Gira Grant
Genres: crime, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
For more than 20 years, no police officers were charged with murder for killing residents in Columbus, Ohio. Five women, bound by grief, confront the impossibility of receiving justice for their loved ones whose lives have been taken and challenge the city’s legacy of withholding answers and ignoring accountability.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a rage-filled indictment here, but Raphaël and Grant do something weirder—they make grief the protagonist, which means the film has to resist easy catharsis and sit in the mess instead. That refusal to perform outrage for the audience is genuinely subversive.
This is documentary work in the strongest curatorial tradition: five women's testimonies arranged with formal precision, each voice positioned to complicate rather than confirm what came before, building toward an architecture of accountability that mirrors the legal system's own failures. The restraint is the rigor.
The decision to let silence and negative space do the emotional labor—the cuts away from faces at the moment of deepest pain—transforms what could've been standard testimony footage into something that trusts the viewer to carry the weight themselves.