The motion picture Fruitvale, a story based on the life and
death of police brutality victim Oscar Grant, took the top prizes at this
year's Sundance Film Festival. The film sheds light on Grant's twenty-two years
of life before a transit officer fatally shot him in Oakland in 2009, and is
the first to win both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award since 2009.
“The project was about humanity, about human beings and how
to treat each other; how we treat the people we love the most, and how we treat
the people that we don't know," Fruitvale's writer and director, first-time
filmmaker Ryan Coogler, said in his acceptance speech.
From Anaheim, California to New York City, police brutality
has been the subject of growing concern across the nation, and it looks like
Fruitvale will do justice to the movement calling for freedom from police-led
harassment and violence. As Fox Searchlight executive Tom Rothman put it,
Fruitvale is “For anyone out there who thinks for one second that movies don't
matter and can't make a difference in the world."