“I Don’t Think Black People Should be Expected to Carry All the Weight of Grappling with America’s History of Racism and White Supremacy”: Rachel Boynton on Civil War (or, Who Do We Think We Are)

Civil War (or, Who Do We Think We Are), the latest doc from Rachel Boynton (Big Men, Our Brand Is Crisis) unfolds in a series of revelations. The project was sparked in the wake of the slaughter of Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC during President Obama’s last year in office,and continued right through the domestic terrorism of the Trump administration. During that time Boynton took a historical journey, traversing the US from Massachusetts to Mississippi, with a singular question in mind: What’s the story of the Civil War? Or more precisely, What’s your story of the Civil War? Boynton began by approaching (all-white and all-Black) classrooms in Chattanooga and Lexington, and found that history is not so much written by the victors but interpreted by point of view. If the story of the Civil War is being taught exclusively from the POV of the white slave holder (centered on his uncontestedly immoral justifications on economic and religious grounds) – or alternately, wholly from that of the enslaved – then these two tales become, in head scratching fashion, both diametrically opposed and simultaneously true. In other words, what the director discovered was a nation not just divided but comprised of two sides completely talking past one another. Civil War (or, Who Do We Think We Are) is Boynton’s heroic – and surprisingly successful – attempt to actually bridge that gap. Filmmaker reached out to Boynton, one of 2005’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” just prior to the doc’s September 17th theatrical (NYC’s IFC Center and LA’s Laemmle Santa Monica) release.

To read my eye-opening interview visit Filmmaker magazine.