During the 1960s a makeshift barricade stood across Suburban Avenue, preventing the black community in Kinloch, Missouri, from entering the predominantly white suburb of Ferguson. Although the barrier was a fixture of the landscape for Kinlochians, former residents interviewed by filmmaker Jane Gillooly cannot recall exactly what it looked like. Weaving together archival materials, interviews, revealing landscape shots, and provocative sound design, Gillooly, herself a Ferguson native, imagines and remembers that ominous intersection, using it to tell a quintessentially American story about segregation from the other side of the tracks. Once a thriving independent black town, Kinloch materializes in Gillooly’s present-day images as a Midwestern ghost town, haunted by the scrubby outlines of razed homes on eerily empty cul-de-sacs. This timely account of the border wall between Kinloch and Ferguson links the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson police to decades of racism. A meditation on race and place in America, it poignantly exposes the tragic trade-offs that faced African Americans who left communities like Kinloch in hopeful search of opportunity and equality.  MP

Filmmaker Q&A following screening