Produced by Stephen Curry and Viola Davis, the film allows the family members of those killed in the 2015
shooting to speak about love, loss and faith
Emanuel, a documentary on the aftermath of the Charleston church massacre, begins not at the scene of the tragedy on 17 June 2015, but with the larger reaction to it – Daily Show host Jon Stewart at a loss for words, President Obama presiding over another press briefing for a mass shooting. But the film then jumps ahead in time, to Nadine Collier’s kitchen in Charleston, South Carolina, as she whips steamed yams into sweet potato pie for her church, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal. Four years earlier, Collier’s mother, Ethel Lance, was killed when a white supremacist gunman opened
fire after Bible study, killing nine black parishioners. The crime was an act of racial hatred so brutal, a violation of a sacred place so inhumane, that it shocked a nation already growing inured to the crushing pattern of mass shootings.
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