“Examining Their Eyes, Hands, Hair, Mouths, and Posture”: Darius Clark Monroe on the Intimacies of Docuseries ‘Dallas, 2019’

Darius Clark Monroe has been on my radar for a decade, ever since his feature debut Evolution of a Criminal, a revisitation of the robbery the filmmaker committed when he was a teenager and its impact on both loved ones and victims, which world premiered at SXSW back in 2014. (Later that year it took top honors at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, where I programmed the film.) Since then Monroe has been on an artistic evolution as well, continuing with such unconventional projects as the 2018 Tribeca-debuting short Black 14, once again EP’d by Evolution executive producer Spike Lee, which explored the story of 14 African American student athletes dismissed from the University of Wyoming football team back in 1969 for speaking out against racism in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and the doc quadtych Racquet, which played the Whitney Biennial the following year. Monroe’s eclectic CV also includes writing and directing for Terence Nance’s Peabody Award–winning HBO series Random Acts of Flyness (2018). Now Monroe has returned home, with the five-part docuseries Dallas, 2019 bringing the Houston native back to the Lone Star State for a “five week observation of the city of Dallas and its people.” Each episode tackles subjects ranging from environmental racism, injustice in the criminal justice system, to education and beyond, all through a chorus of characters that breathe life into those cold abstract concepts. To learn all about the series, which premiered over two nights on Independent Lens on January 3 and 4, Documentary reached out to the Brooklyn-based filmmaker.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.