3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets

The “loud music” murder trial of Michael Dunn is the urgent subject of Marc Silver’s unhurried, deeply perceptive and stirring documentary, a special jury award winner at Sundance this year. Dunn is the middle-aged white Floridian who in 2012 fired his gun into a car carrying four unarmed African American teens, killing Jordan Davis. In court and out, Dunn insists he is the victim, allegedly threatened by imminent lethal violence from Davis, who he describes as brandishing something he took to be a shotgun (though no weapon was ever found). Taking place in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder and just before Ferguson became a worldwide flashpoint, Silver’s up-close investigation cuts through the miasma of mainstream media discourse. It pinpoints the racism and politics behind the tragedy in the inability to recognize the victim as a human being. Featuring candid interviews with the parents and friends of Jordan Davis as well as startling recordings of Dunn’s phone calls to his distraught fiancée, 3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets never over-dramatizes but rather brilliantly humanizes its subjects, illuminating the essentials of what became a sensational news story while chronicling the role of the case in a reenergized civil rights movement. —Robert Avila