Where the Pavement Ends

• MoMA Documentary Fortnight
• Camden International Film Festival
• Full Frame Documentary Festival
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This artful exploration of the historical context of injustice in Ferguson, Missouri that presaged the unrest there in 2014-2015 depicts a micro-history of race relations in America.

A global spotlight fell on Ferguson as it erupted in protests following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, and remained in turmoil for over a year as a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer involved, and a federal investigation revealed institutionalized racism in its police force.  But the history of Ferguson is not well known.  Prior to a 1970 hearing in St. Louis before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Ferguson was a white-only 'sundown town' effectively sealed off from the segregated neighboring black-only town of Kinloch, formerly vibrant but now semi-abandoned. 

Where The Pavement Ends begins with a focus on a Jim Crow era roadblock that divided the two towns for as long as people can remember until the early 1970s.  It revisits a 1968 protest over the roadblock to draw parallels with the events of 2014, which began over a jaywalking incident.  Actual restriction of movement played a significant role in each flashpoint of racial strife.  

The film progresses in a collage-like blending of archival materials, maps, recordings, reflections, and interviews, to illuminate social, psychological, political and economic histories that create a tapestry of a community.  Despite the changes within the community that began in the late 1960s, one subject recalls that the "hard things" were never dealt with, until now.

The film proposes Kinloch as a lens for seeing more deeply into the charged atmosphere which led to Mike Brown’s death and the massive unrest that followed.  And as a recording of an old Kinlochian woman intones, “anything that’s swept under the rug, in the beginning—as long as that stays covered up, it’s gonna have a smell…and rotten up everything.”