Australian Centre for the Moving Image: 'Had a 'I could die any day’ attitude," rapped Kanye West, a Chicago native, about his hometown last year, and that idea comes to painful, intractable life in this remarkable documentary. Cultivated over 12 months, beginning in 2009, from street corner interventions, frank discussions and tripwire confrontations, The Interrupters is the stories of the men and women, former criminals and gang members, who now attempt to short-circuit the spread of murderous violence that has made the Windy City into an epicenter of casual tragedy.
Made by director Steve James, who traversed some of these same streets with his 1994 documentary about inner-city basketball prodigies, Hoop Dreams, and author and producer Alex Kotlowitz, there are no easy successes and numerous setbacks in these stories that are set against a backdrop of constant and often needless gun deaths. 'Words will get you killed," notes one Interrupter, Ameena Matthews, and the sheer repetitive level of violence and waste explains the often nihilistic outlook of urban youth. Police and news crews can’t keep up with the homicides and sidewalk memorials dot the streets; 'I am next," is hastily scrawled on a wall listing the many already killed.
The film – screening at Melbourne’s ACMI until Tuesday 31 January – is a frontline production: there’s no discussion of salient factors, such as America’s gun laws or the policies that create under-privileged inner-city communities where imprisonment is common and too many fathers are absent. Sitting in the back seat of cars, setting up in anonymous conference rooms, James captures the everyday actions of the organisations that document the crisis, such as CeaseFire, and the Interrupters themselves. The challenge is cripplingly obvious: an office meeting ends suddenly when staffers have to spring outside to defuse a confrontation; a knife is brandished and punches are thrown but no-one is shot. It’s better than many go.
With its hip-hop accoutrements, existential bravado and random violence, the comparison for many is televisions’ fictional portrayal of another American city, Baltimore, on The Wire, but for all that show’s storied resonance, The Interrupters gradually goes deeper, pulling back layer after layer to reveal not only those at risk, but those trying to save them. One Interrupters meeting is summed up as presenting the wisdom of '500 years of prison time", and people such as the charismatic, fearless Matthews and the dogged Ricardo 'Cobe" Williams operate under respect generated by their former wrongs. They have no simple answer, and it’s heartbreaking to see how they struggle to get the simplest message through to some they counsel.
James allows storylines to develop, but they’re not overtly shaped. The situation is Chicago is often compared to a 'war" and an 'epidemic", and neither is fanciful (one crucial incident witnessed is averting retribution for a murdered 13-year-old shot 22 times). Gary Slutkin, the founder of CeaseFire, is an epidemiologist, and he sees violence as a disease with the various Interrupters preventing transmission. The outcomes are fascinating, such as the efforts by Williams to tamp down one individual, 'Flamo", whose desire for revenge after a police raid on his family home is so malignant that he proclaims that God will look after his four children while he’s in jail for taking a life.
The Chicago seen in The Interrupters, in neighbourhoods such as Englewood, looks like a world we might know, but the level of violence and the circular nature of it results in an out of body experience. It’s both all too real and somehow unreal, and that splitting of reality before our eyes, with James’ camera as the anchor holding you in place, is what makes The Interrupters such a revelatory work. There are moments here that will lighten your soul, but many more will haunt you.
