FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Fruitvale Station

Fruitvale Station takes a look at the ever-dividing American society. There is no doubt that this film shows a piece of reality and that has the effect of a fable, almost a teaching play. Oscar Grant (the fantastic Michael B. Jordan!) actually existed: A 22 year old man, whose death we experience right at the beginning of the film: Phone footage on a New York subway platform. Cops hit Oscar and his friends. A gunshot finally kills Oscar. The rest of the film shows what Oscar did that day before he was shot on New Year's Eve 2009. Mind you, this is a person with dreams and feelings, who had a daughter and whose death left a huge vacuum for many relatives and friends. Oscar was a human being, not a wild animal. The remark may sound quite unnecessary - but it isn't, given the roles that blacks usually get in American movies! Over the last thirty years we have seen the black man in the cinema as a force bolt, but he seems to be morally and intellectually inferior. Black intelligence? The very highest "street smart"! Fruitvale Station knows this whole story. Director Ryan Coogler lets us participate in an ordinary day of Oscar. He is dressed like a "homeboy", but Oscar is not a bat. He's a father worried about his daughter's next rent and schooling. He used to deal, but now he lost his job in the supermarket and is thinking of selling pot again. Fruitvale Station is one of the classics of social realism. Oscar is one of these charismatic anti-heroes, who is glimpsed quite ephemerally and yet with deep sensitivity. We know this kind of cinema mainly from Great Britain - the only difference to the role models: Fruitvale Station is set in America and the hero is black. Who considers this difference as small, should try to imagine the figures in similar works as a black man... And? It is the merit of Jordan's play and Coogler's direction to set some omens early in the film, as Oscar realizes, that his freedom, his whole existence can simply be overturned by quite trivial unfair violence.