Program Highlights:
Advance Tickets include a processing fee – see our Ticket Policy page for more information. All content ©Brattle Film Foundation unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved worldwide. The Brattle Film Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit, supported in part by a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. Classic film programming is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts., and by the Cabot Family Charitable Trust. Your privacy is important to us – view our Privacy Policy.
40 BRATTLE ST • HARVARD SQ • BRATTLEFILM.ORG • 617-876-6837
Special Events Archive • Independent Film Festival Boston 2017
The Force
Buy Tickets
New England Premiere
Genre: Documentary
Runtime: 80 minutes
Director: Peter Nicks
Presented by:
Sprawling, immediate, and complex, Peter Nicks’s vérité documentary moves like a pulsing, timely thriller. In 2014, after over a decade of federal monitoring for misconduct and civil rights abuses, the Oakland Police Department hires Chief Sean Whent—a young, clear-eyed idealist—in hopes of bridging an historically tense divide between its officers and the community they serve. Whent’s intentions and calls for transparency are immediately met with enthusiasm, but as his tenure begins, the realities of his department’s scandal-plagued past coincide with fresh accusations of brutality and harassment. The Force captures everything; it hovers over Oakland’s evening skies and rides inside speeding police vehicles, granting viewers breathless firsthand access to some of law enforcement’s most dangerous jobs. With fly-on-the-wall intimacy, we see a department trapped in transition, desperate to shed its corrupt image but also challenged by an increasingly organized and urgent Black Lives Matter movement erupting right outside its doorstep.
—Sundance Film Festival guide