A dozen years ago, at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, I sat in the Eccles Theatre and watched “Fruitvale” (later entitled “Fruitvale Station”), Ryan Coogler’s true-life drama about Oscar Grant, a young man who was fatally shot by Bay Area police, even though he had done nothing. By the time the film ended, everyone in the audience knew that we’d seen something straight-up extraordinary, and that Coogler was a born filmmaker. When he got up on stage, he was ebullient — grateful for the response, but you could also see, as his words poured forth, that he was already bursting with the stories he wanted to tell. This, for
→ Continue reading at Variety
