PREVIEW: Jamie Kalven and Bill Morrison Bring Oscar-Nominated Documentary to Capital Region
10/17/25 @ The Writers Institute, UAlbany
10/18/25 @ Arts Letters & Numbers, Averill Park
“…what this shows is a kind of everyday policing in a racist society that is simultaneously tragic and really absurd…I think the reality is that you could expel all known racists from law enforcement and the system we have would continue to produce racist outcomes.”
The Chicago-based tandem of investigative journalist Jamie Kalven and filmmaker Bill Morrison are bringing their 2025 National Magazine-award-winning and 2025 Academy Award-nominated documentary Incident to upstate New York for a brief tour of the region that will include screenings at Colgate University and The Writers Institute at UAlbany on Thursday and Friday. It also includes a devoted lecture titled The View From the Ground: The Practice of Guerilla Journalism on the South Side of Chicago to be delivered by Kalven at Arts Letters & Numbers co-sponsored by The Writers Institute and Metroland Now on Saturday evening.
The film, which was directed by Morrison and based on Kalven’s award-winning reporting, explores the 2018 killing of Harith Augustus by police in the windy city. The film was made from around 20 hours of unedited body cam footage, and revealed the immediate aftermath of the killing as well as a raw look at the formation of the police narrative in real time. The pair spoke with me about the film and the lessons they hope society can take from it via telephone from the Invisible Institute on the South Side of Chicago, a nonprofit news organization focused on police accountability and transparency founded by Kalven, which has received three Pulitzer Prizes among many other national honors.
“The heart of the work is this kind of ethnographically rich reporting that we try to do, and it's issued in a number of different forms,” Kalven explained. “You have long form reporting for national publications, feature-length documentaries, art exhibits, a couple of podcasts. Out of that practice, collaboration with Bill on the film emerged.”
It was a long process to gain access to all of the video that comprises the film. In the aftermath of Augustus' death, Kalven and several colleagues who had anecdotally reported on the incident had the opportunity to team up with a like-minded human rights watchdog group in the United Kingdom, Forensic Architecture, on another project called Six Durations of a Split Second.
“We reconstructed the same fatal interaction between police and a member of the community via access to all sorts of video: body camera video, dash cam video, CCTV video. We did it in six different timescales, so six short videos from milliseconds to years. So milliseconds, seconds, then it's days, years… for about six months, we really immersed ourselves in that project working with the available video evidence and 3D modeling.” That project can be found on the Forensic Architecture’s website.
A couple of years after that project concluded, Kalven received some news that he’d nearly forgotten he was expecting: after years of fighting the city on Freedom of Information litigation, they finally capitulated and handed over all available video from the incident. Suddenly, he had access to a new windfall of unedited body cam footage from every officer involved in the incident and its aftermath, up to an hour and a half after the incident occurred. He told me that it contained an additional 20 hours of footage.
In the summer of 2022, Kalven published an article in The Intercept detailing the footage – this article would soon be picked up by Morrison. It wasn’t long before the longtime friends were revisiting previous discussions of collaboration. “When Jamie published that article, it came with YouTube links that referenced exactly what he was talking about. He would describe a scene, and then you could actually go to this YouTube link, and it would show that scene,” he explained.
“As I started following those links, I realized that there was a whole archive of links that were held under Chicago COPA, which is the police oversight agency.” Morrison was referring to Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability, who, per their website, provide “a just and efficient means for conducting investigations of police misconduct brought against members of the Chicago Police Department.”
From there, Morrison was able to download the clips and began synchronizing audio from police walkie talkies and lining the pieces of media up in order to get different synchronous views. He began playing around with formats and came up with the quadrant layout used in Incident. Using the audio, he was able to pinpoint organically where the story would start and end from the time that the body cams were initially triggered until the point where the commander on scene requested that everyone turn their body cams off. “At that point, everything goes silent,” he explained. “So that sort of dictated where the beginning and the end of the film was.”
Kalven chimed in to praise Morrison’s work on the project: “I should emphasize Bill's incredible sensibility and craftsmanship in doing this. This is a 30-minute continuous narrative that is built completely out of body camera footage and a little bit of other surveillance footage from a stationary site in the neighborhood.” He went on to describe it as a tour de force in filmmaking. But, he said, it’s not just in the directorial style that the film shines.
“From my perspective as an investigative reporter, it's also revelatory of what happens in the immediate aftermath of a police killing because we see from these multiple perspectives. We are able to witness what in fact happened, and then we also see the process by which the police narrative forms and hardens. It's quite extraordinary that way.” The film does not use a classical narrator, or a “voice of God” as Kalven calls it, that is typically used in a documentary. Instead, the film utilizes a little bit of text to accompany and contextualize the actual footage. They described this as having a unique effect on the audience, with crowds reporting that it evokes the feeling of simply coming upon a crime scene organically.
“You move through your city, yellow tape, lights flashing, and you wonder, ‘what happened there?’” he said. “What the film does is it drops you right in the center of what happened, and because the film is able to present things that are happening simultaneously with the divided screen, you're actually taking in more information than would be possible to absorb if you were in fact there. One of the really fascinating things for me as a journalist is how the film sort of makes the audience a co-investigator of what happened. As the film unfolds, people are conducting their own inquiry.”
Morrison added that the way the film presents the narrative also serves to place the viewer right there on the street as the sea of information grows more and more unruly, with the narratives of the officers and civilians on the scene clashing against each other and colliding like waves in a storm.
“Because of the split screen and the nature of the imagery that average audience members are flustered and enervated by, it's overstimulating. You have the sort of rush that I think you know the police were feeling and that the people on the scene were feeling. It’s somehow communicated in the footage, and the audience feels that viscerally.” He explained that the narratives coalesce in unspoken terms, with the police giving each other a story to repeat and a narrative taking form in real time about what happened, even as the cameras are telling us something different.
Kalven also made a point to emphasize another dimension of the film: it humanizes the police officers at the center of the incident for the viewers. “Not necessarily in a sympathetic way,” he explained. “The two young officers who are principally involved in the shooting, and the officer who precipitated the incident are pretty clearly traumatized. They're struggling for words to explain to themselves what happened, so that they can just kind of go forward and take the next breath. That semi-hysterical response of ‘oh my god, what just happened’ almost immediately hardens into the official narrative. Then there are multiple civilian witnesses, some of whom are trying really hard to be heard by the police, that the police are shooing away.”
He said that this humanization of the officers on scene and their trauma around what happened gives valuable insight into the problems we face in the criminal justice system. “In the post-Black Lives Matter moment, there can be a tendency to think of the police as being sort of a monolithically racist institution. There certainly are racist outcomes, but I think what this shows is a kind of everyday policing in a racist society that is simultaneously tragic and really absurd.”
Kalven elaborated on that absurdity further, noting that in his extensive experience reporting on issues of police accountability and state violence there has been a tendency in public discourse to assume that the problem we face is actively racist police officers. “I think that is a problem, and I would never claim that somebody like Derek Chauvin, based on what we saw in the George Floyd murder, was anything short of proactively racist; but I think the reality is that you could expel all known racists from law enforcement and the system we have would continue to produce racist outcomes.”
He emphasized that while you can certainly attribute a kind of racism to the inexperienced white officers in the film, it is the mode of policing itself that set them up to fail the predominately Black neighborhood they found themselves in. “Particularly in a city like Chicago, where there's a level of racial segregation that I think warrants being described as a kind of apartheid, the thing that we haven't been able to really grapple with as much as we should are the underlying systemic conditions that, absent anybody's active racist intent, will continue to produce these kinds of consequences if we don't change it.” He maintained that if we continue to think of the problem as being as simple as evil racist police officers harming Black residents, we will continue to miss how the machinery of the criminal justice system actually works and we might never be able to move past these troubling outcomes.
He noted that while most of the discourse around criminal justice reform centers around the damage done by police to oppressed and underserved communities, the officers themselves should also be considered. “I want to say this carefully, because I don't want to suggest any kind of moral equivalence between them and a person dead on the ground,” he noted. “But they're also victims. It's almost like the police department and the prevailing mode of policing is implicated in pulling the trigger along with the individual. They've been badly trained, they haven't been socialized to the neighborhood in which they're working. They're part of a culture that thinks that policing means charging into every situation.”
Kalven and Morrison hope to be a big part of changing that very culture and spoke to me of the importance of a paradigm shift in criminal justice. They noted that there is a competing theory of policing, one that emphasizes a more defensive posture and deescalation instead of confrontation. They have high hopes that Incident could even be incorporated into future police training at academies across the United States. “We hope that the film will be shown in these academies as another set of dangers that you confront,” Kalven said. “If you're unthinking and just reflexive, you could be catapulted into a situation that will take someone else's life and have a dramatic impact on your own.”
Whether that paradigm shift will ever occur in our lifetime remains to be seen, but the way paradigm shifts start is with people asking the right questions. If you’ve ever found yourself considering the impact of policing on marginalized people and their communities and what it might be like to make real substantial change, this screening of Incident and the subsequent lecture coming up later this week was made for you to soak in.
For more information on the screening of Incident at the NYS Writers Institute at UAlbany, visit https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org/incident
For more information on The View From the Ground: The Practice of Guerilla Journalism on the South Side of Chicago, visit artslettersandnumbers.com/the-view-from-the-ground
