![]() The series has a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for an Emmy. A system conspired to ensure there was no justice for his family. Trayvon’s story is treated with respect, his narrative straightforward and uncomplicated: A child was wrongly killed. If you believe him guilty, you’ll find Furst and Nason are competent with this form. If you believe Zimmerman innocent, you’re probably not watching this doc in the first place. Their approach here is unassailable and not meant to change minds. Rest in Power was directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, whose previous credits include Time: The Kalief Browder Story. ![]() It omits that if they wanted this to stop, it already would have. Hope tells you that we’re almost there if we just keep going. Yet it is remarkably useful for keeping intact the systems that caused the despair. Hope is necessary to ward off despair, to foment resistance. After five episodes meticulously detailing how a Black child was killed at the hands of a white Hispanic man known to be a virulent racist whose own neighbors admitted the only reason he noticed, approached, and harassed Trayvon was because Trayvon was Black after five episodes detailing how Zimmerman’s defense team successfully tried Trayvon for his own killing, claiming he had brought death upon himself by being a Black teenager in a world violently afraid of Black teenagers after detailing how the judge refused the mention of race in her courtroom after demonstrating how the mere presence of Zimmerman as a defendant in a court of law led to the election of Donald Trump and an unprecedented rise in white hate groups and despite detailing how an entire media industry coalesced around villainizing Trayvon - after all that, the documentary ends with rousing music and all the inspiration of a Pepsi commercial. ![]() The six-part series ends audaciously hopeful. Could it offer me something in the way of inspiration or a sense of validated identity from seeing this story told well? At first, all I thought it did was stir up the same feelings that haven’t left me since Trayvon’s killing: an angry fatigue, a charged boredom, a shockingly broad and fierce weariness at how much time we must spend convincing this country that our lives matter. Nonetheless, it remains the only legitimate documentary about Trayvon. I skipped it then for the same reason a person who has survived a shark attack might skip Shark Week. Whatever the reason, I found it very hard to recently watch for the first time Rest in Power, the 2018 Jay-Z-produced documentary about the death of Trayvon Martin, the trial of George Zimmerman, and the aftermath. Maybe I’m too old, been Black in America for too long. The poster for Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story, executive-produced by Jay-Z.
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