EXCLUSIVE: For decades Baltimore struggled with an alarmingly high crime rate – high enough that it risked being tagged as America’s murder capital. When Brandon Scott was elected mayor in 2020 at the age of 36 – becoming the youngest person to hold that office in Baltimore history – he vowed to take a different and more innovative approach to lowering crime.
Scott’s effort to rescue his city – and the opposition he faced to implementing his bold violence reduction strategy – are told in the documentary The Body Politic, directed by Baltimore native Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough. The film will have a limited theatrical run at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in New York beginning Sept. 27, and at the Laemmle North Hollywood beginning October 18 (with filmmaker Q&As). It premieres on the PBS series POV on Monday, November 25, streaming simultaneously in the U.S. on all PBS-branded apps.
We have your first look at the film in the trailer above.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott
ITVS/POV
“Like many areas in the United States, the City of Baltimore has been plagued by gun violence,” notes a synopsis of the film. “Amid the George Floyd uprising, Brandon Scott, a young reform-minded leader, is elected mayor. His hope is to lower violence in the city with a new public health-focused approach rather than relying solely on policing, which he feels others have done. With unfettered access, cameras follow him and his team of young leaders throughout their first year in city hall, unveiling an ambitious plan to lower the city’s murder rate. When opposition mounts, his commitment to his principles puts his political future in jeopardy. Will his holistic approach lead to healing and serve as a blueprint for the rest of the nation?”
The Body Politic premiered last June at the prestigious Sheffield DocFest in the U.K. and has gone on to screen around the globe, including the Zanzibar International Film Festival in Tanzania, IDFA in Amsterdam, the One World International Film Festival/Jeden svět in Prague, and the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival and Woods Hole Film Festival, both in Massachusetts. At Woods Hole, the film won the Jury Award for Best Documentary and the Directors’ Choice Emerging Filmmaker Award. It won audience awards at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis and the Omaha Film Festival in Nebraska.
Director Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough
PBS
At a Q&A following the world premiere at Sheffield DocFest (moderated by Deadline), director Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough and producer John Benam discussed the evolution of their documentary.
“We actually started just wanting to make an election film, like Baltimore’s version of Street Fight,” Goodenough explained. “We followed Brandon and four other candidates and then everything [changed] with George Floyd. And through that we decided we wanted to follow whoever won the election, to really see what healing and change was in the city of Baltimore. Because everybody running in that election was really focused on violence reduction; they all just had different ways and different approaches.”
Goodenough continued, “So, when Brandon won, it became this process of us following Brandon every day and convincing him to be comfortable with us and let us follow him because the news has been weaponized not only in Baltimore, but across the world.”
Erricka Bridgeford in ‘The Body Politic’
Mayoral duties kept Scott from attending the world premiere, but one of the other protagonists of the film did make it to Sheffield: peace activist Erricka Bridgeford, co-founder of Baltimore Ceasefire 365 (now called the Baltimore Peace Movement). She addressed one of the dilemmas Scott faced as he tried to innovate on crime and violence reduction – people wanted immediate results, but the complex nature of the problem does not lend itself to a “magic wand” solution. The only way a politician can show “immediate results” is by arranging to round up large percentages of the population and toss them behind bars – an approach adopted by Pres. Clinton in the 1990s (and supported by then-Sen. Joe Biden), which backfired in the long run.
“I’m not naive about how long it actually takes to heal something so infected like a violence epidemic,” Bridgeford told the Sheffield DocFest audience. “I know how long it takes. And so I know that while I’m doing the work to stop it, I’m going to bury people. That’s the reality of it. It’s not a fun thing that people like to hear. But I also am not going to allow systems of oppression, violent oppression, to wash their hands clean of something that it created by saying, ‘Let’s just lock everybody up,’ because that’s blaming the victim.”
Bridgeford added, “A lot of the violence we’re seeing right now is a result of all of the mandatory minimums [sentencing] and ‘zero tolerance’ that we saw in the ’80s and ’90s in Baltimore because a lot of those people who were incarcerated, got out of prison, grew up, had children. And so when you traumatize people in that way by just locking everybody up, trauma begets violence. It does not beget peace. Locking people up does not beget peace. It begets people who feel unworthy and inhuman and so they’re going to prove to you how inhuman they can be. And that’s not what healing looks like.”
Marilyn Ness, director of the 2018 Oscar-shortlisted documentary Charm City, which featured Brandon Scott back when he was serving on the Baltimore City Council, is among the executive producers of The Body Politic. Fellow EPs include Katy Chevigny, Mark Grieco (who also serves as story consultant), Brock Williams, Jeffrey Pechter, and Rudy Valdez (HBO’s The Sentence).
The Body Politic is directed and produced by Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough and produced by Dawne Langford and John Benam. Cinematography is by John Benam and Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough. The editor is Thomas Niles; Caleb Stine composed the score.
Watch the trailer for The Body Politic above.
