At a film festival with plenty of big picture movies about race (Roger Ross Williams’ “Stamped From the Beginning” and Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” among them), Raoul Peck’s “Silver Dollar Road” is a specific and damning case study of one place, one family and one monumental case of injustice.
Peck, director of the Oscar-nominated James Baldwin doc “I Am Not Your Negro,” is attuned to exploring larger issues through the reverberations of a single incident, in this case the eight-year jail terms served by two Black men for remaining on the land that had been taken from them in North Carolina.
The film, which premiered on Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, would be baffling, except that cases of racial injustice can and have been both inexplicable and predictable.