It wasn't a deliberate choice to focus on North Carolina, she says. Berry mentioned to the producer that she needed to get things wrapped up before the election because she had to do voting-rights work the producer's interest was piqued, and she called de Mare, who was intrigued. Laverne Berry, a Brooklyn entertainment lawyer, and her friends Miller and Claire Wright are planning to head to the center of the storm, North Carolina, to serve as election monitors for the Democratic Party.ĭirector Anne de Mare says she first conceived of this story through Berry, who was doing work for one of the film's producers.
That sets the backdrop for Capturing the Flag, which begins a few days before the election. That law was later struck down by the courts, but by 2016 these efforts had solidified the state's reputation for antagonism to voting rights. This manifested, among other places, in North Carolina, which restricted Sunday voting and implemented a strict voter ID law under Governor Pat McCrory. Holder decision, which overturned part of the Voting Rights Act and opened up a Pandora's box for Republican states that wanted to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Straightaway, the film describes these efforts, starting with the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby v. And that is how we got this bungling disaster of a presidency.īut that's not to say the right to vote isn't endangered, or that there aren't active, ongoing efforts to disenfranchise minorities. The bottom line of 2016 was this: Clinton didn't excite voters, and Trump, as loathed as he was, hit a royal flush, winning exactly the states he needed to win with the tiniest of margins. After all, while Wisconsin's draconian voter ID law may have helped throw that state to Donald Trump-one analysis found that as many as forty-five thousand people there were deterred from voting in a state Trump won by fewer than twenty-three thousand votes-North Carolina's similarly naked attempts to suppress African-American votes never went into effect
#CAPTURING REALITY THE ART OF DOCUMENTARY REVIEW MOVIE#
It's also a weird way to end a movie about voting rights in the Tar Heel state. "What the fuck are they all voting for?" he yells to no one in particular.įor those of us who lived through that night with similar convulsions of horror and disbelief, watching that scene elicits something like posttraumatic stress. One, Steven Miller, is especially losing his shit. Being liberals who traveled to the state from New York City, they are dismayed by what they're watching. Capturing the Flag, an often infuriating documentary about voting suppression in North Carolina, climaxes in a hotel room in Cumberland County, where three exhausted election volunteers are sprawled on beds watching the 2016 returns come in on the television.
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