3 1/2 Minutes is the story of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, who was killed at a Florida gas station for not turning his music down. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house during this screening.
Jordan Davis in his last school photo
Participant Media / Via walkwithjordan.org
PARK CITY, UTAH — There's a moment early on in 3 ½ Minutes where nearly everyone in the audience collectively laughs.
In the documentary, which was shown at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, Lucia McBath is sitting at a table and fesses up to Ron Davis, revealing that the only reason she agreed to a naming rights deal with him (she'd name a son; he'd name a daughter) when they were expecting their first and only child together was because she found out early they were having a boy. Davis never knew that, the audience shares that laugh together, and it is one of the last times that particular sound is heard over the course of the 98-minute film.
The sounds heard most often throughout the rest of the screening were sniffles and, in some cases, outright bawling, given the subject matter centered on how Jordan Davis — whose parents called him their miracle baby after experiencing several miscarriages — would never see his 18th birthday. Davis was killed in 2012 at a Jacksonville gas station for, according to Florida prosecutors, refusing to turn down loud hip-hop music when asked by his killer, Michael Dunn. British filmmaker Marc Silver reached out to Jordan's parents about six months after Jordan's killing (which wasn't that long after fellow Florida teen Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman) because he felt this was an opportunity to document what he saw as a horrific trend in the States.
McBath, who, along with Ron Davis, has been a strong presence in the #BlackLivesMatter fight, heard the sobs of a theater filled with strangers, and was comforted by the empathy of people who never met her son, but who shared the pain of her and Davis' loss while watching them on their quest to seek justice for Jordan.
Lucia McBath, Jordan's mother.
Participant Media / Via http://Sundance.org
"People are paying attention now," McBath said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. "That's been the biggest hurdle in this country. These kinds of things have been going on for years in minority communities, and everyone turns a blind eye to it. As long as it's black-on-black crime, people go, 'Oh, those are those neighborhoods.' But now that these kinds of atrocities are happening, and it's being exposed … the country is going to have to be forced to deal with what's happening with gun culture and race."
Was their son a victim of racial profiling, considering Dunn argued that he feared for his life? In court, Dunn said he worried that the four black teens would kill him. He called them gangsters, and their music, according to his fiancée, "thug music." He also said that he thought he saw one of the kids wield a gun, which is what prompted him to retrieve his own gun. A gun was never found, and the teen boys claim they did not have one. (They also say in the documentary that they'd never really seen a gun before, and had he just pulled it out to scare them off, it would have worked.)
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