Filmmaker Jason Pollock conducts a revealing investigation into the Ferguson shooting. 
 
 Stranger Fruit, an explosive documentary retracing the events surrounding the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, begins with an image of the Ferguson, Missouri, African-American high school grad proudly wearing his cap and gown. 
 
 He’d die eight days later, unarmed, of multiple gunshot wounds at the hands of white police officer Darren Wilson, who would ultimately be exonerated of any criminal wrongdoing by a state grand jury, igniting a firestorm of protests in Ferguson and throughout the country. 
 
 Determined to set the record straight, director Jason Pollock (a protege of Michael Moore) opens his own investigation — and the damning, emotionally charged results clearly struck a chord with the audience at its SXSW world premiere, which was attended by Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden. 
 
 Thanks to Pollock’s dropping of a major bombshell in the form of additional surveillance footage that had evidently been suppressed by Ferguson police, the film (the title draws upon the lynching protest poem “Strange Fruit”) may even generate traction in efforts calling upon the Department of Justice to reopen Brown’s case. 
 
 Brown’s graduation from Normandy High was a big deal at a school with a four-year graduation rate of 61.5%. He was just about to head off to college when he and a friend were detained in a police ped (“pedestrian”) stop that went terribly wrong, with Wilson, claiming he feared for his safety, firing a dozen shots at Brown — the last one fatally penetrating his skull. 
 
 Incorporating computer-generated recreations based on extensive interviews with Brown’s family, eyewitnesses and public officials — as well as footage from an ABC interview Wilson did with a less-than-convinced-looking George Stephanopoulos — Pollock compellingly points a finger at the institutionalized racism that has permeated a disturbing number of the country’s police forces. 
 
 And that’s before the big reveal: newly-discovered footage not disclosed by the police department that would suggest Brown hadn’t robbed a nearby convenience store of a handful of cigarillos as maintained, an omission that was seen as a bid to demonize Brown. 
 
 While the film’s detractors will likely argue that Pollock has an agenda that resides squarely in the Brown family’s court, there’s no denying the heartbreaking impact of seeing McSpadden grieving her child with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice hovering closely at her side. 
 
 “Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,” indeed. 
 
 Production company: Boom 
 
 Content director-screenwriter: Jason Pollock 
 
 Producer: Jeremiah Younossi 
 
 Executive producer: Chris Perez 
 
 Cinematography: Beth Cloutier, Jason Pollock 
 
 Editor: Jason Pollock 
 
 Music: Dan Edinberg, Chris Zabriskie 
 
 Venue: South by Southwest (Documentary Spotlight) 
 
 Sales: Preferred Content, CAA 
 
 95 minutes ||||| In the two and a half years since Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., the explosive case has been parsed in intricate detail. Witnesses offered varying descriptions of the fatal encounter. Investigators examined bloodstain evidence on the street where Mr. Brown died. And the police released a security video from a nearby store that showed Mr. Brown pushing a worker and taking cigarillos minutes before the shooting. 
 
 But a second, previously unreported video from that same convenience store included in a new documentary is raising new questions about what happened in the hours before the shooting on Aug. 9, 2014. 
 
 The footage shows Mr. Brown entering the store, Ferguson Market and Liquor, shortly after 1 a.m. on the day he died. He approaches the counter, hands over an item that appears to be a small bag and takes a shopping sack filled with cigarillos. Mr. Brown is shown walking toward the door with the sack, then turning around and handing the cigarillos back across the counter before exiting. 
 
 Jason Pollock, a documentary filmmaker who acquired the new tape, says the footage challenges the police narrative that Mr. Brown committed a strong-armed robbery when he returned to the store around noon that day. Instead, Mr. Pollock believes that the new video shows Mr. Brown giving a small bag of marijuana to store employees and receiving cigarillos in return as part of a negotiated deal. Mr. Pollock said Mr. Brown left the cigarillos behind the counter for safekeeping.
– The narrative of the last moments of Michael Brown's life tends to begin here: With the 18-year-old allegedly stealing cigarillos from a Ferguson, Missouri, convenience store shortly before he was shot dead by Officer Darren Wilson. Now, a documentary that screened Saturday at South by Southwest in Austin uses previously unseen surveillance footage to argue that Brown did not in fact rob Ferguson Market and Liquor, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The alternate story as presented in Stranger Fruit by Jason Pollock—a Michael Moore "protege," notes the Hollywood Reporter: In the new footage, Brown is shown arriving at the shop at 1am on Aug. 9, 2014. Pollock believes Brown was there to do a trade with store clerks: some marijuana in exchange for two boxes of cigarillos. The clip shows Brown taking the boxes but then turning back and leaving them with the clerks, in Pollock's view, to retrieve later. The surveillance footage that was widely seen in the case shows Brown back at the shop just before noon, seizing the cigarillos and shoving co-owner Andy Patel when Patel asked Brown for payment (Patel wasn't working during Brown's earlier visit); a customer called 911, and Brown was dead minutes later. A lawyer for the store disputes the new chain of events, telling the New York Times, "Those folks didn’t sell him cigarillos for pot. The reason he gave [the cigarillos] back is he was walking out the door with unpaid merchandise and they wanted it back." It's unclear how Pollock obtained the footage, but his reading of police records in the case, which mentioned the earlier visit, alerted him to its possible existence. Police haven't confirmed the authenticity of the video. (Here's what Darren Wilson's life was like one year after the shooting.)