Oscar-Winning Short Film About Police Violence Walks Thin Line Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Working in between production shut down regulations, a creative production company collaborated with an emerging filmmaker to complete an Oscar-winning short film just in time for awards season. In Two Distant Strangers, protagonist Carter, a young cartoonist played by rapper Joey Badass, tries to get home to his dog after spending the night out. Shortly after setting foot outside the building, however, he’s murdered by a police officer in an all-too-familiar scene where he is suffocated while gasping, “I can’t breathe.” Carter continues to wake up day after day, only to be murdered by police in a variety of ways, despite attempts to change the outcome. The connections to reality are direct and intentional. To Netflix audiences seeing the film during the officer convicted of killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, Derek Chauvin’s, murder trial, this was a familiar scene. For Black Americans, it’s “a confirmation that when people say all you have to do is comply, we know that isn’t true,” writer/director Travon Free, who has written for Wilmore, The Daily Show and Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, told Adweek. “For white audiences that don’t truly understand that experience, I hope they walk away with more empathy.” Last June, amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, Free developed a concept around the idea that reliving the trauma of seeing police killing Black people over and over felt like “the worst version of Groundhog Day.” He reached out to Dirty Robber co-founder and creative director Martin Desmond Roe, who he was already collaborating with on a different script, to see if it'd be possible to pull off. From there, Free went straight to writing and completing a script in five days. “Being a TV writer, it’s really easy to write a half-hour script in a week. I knew what it was and what I wanted it to be,” Free said. “It was about trying to get the emotion on the page and not overthinking it.” Agnostic creators Over the course of its history, Dirty Robber has balanced commercial projects, documentaries such as 2015’s Kobe Bryant’s Muse and other films largely by pursuing its interests. After launching as a post-production company, a previous Oscar-nominated short film, Buzkashi Boys, helped open commercial doors for the company as it emerged as a full production company, including leading to a long relationship with Nike. Dirty Robber now works on everything from creative strategy to post-production, and its series We Are the Champions is currently running on Netflix. “We always wanted to tell stories and have been agnostic about where that goes,” Roe said. After Muse, Dirty Robber further built its reputation on the strength of its 2017 Breaking2 documentary for Nike, co-produced by National Geographic, which focused on elite runners’ attempts to finish a marathon in under two hours. “We’re a business, and we need to be sustainable,” Dirty Robber CEO Chris Uettwiller said. “It’s as important to tell a good six-second story as it is a six-minute story and a 60-minute story.” How Production Companies Are Taking a Bite Out of Agency Business After the success of Nike’s documentary, CMOs were knocking on the production company’s door asking for their own Breaking2. “The answer was: 'Let’s build a relationship,'” Uettwiller said. “Being able to have permission from a brand like Nike to shoot with their athletes [while the brand isn’t present] doesn’t happen overnight.” Such commercial projects ultimately paved the way for the company to be in a position to manage an Oscar-level sprint in a pandemic: beginning filming just as restrictions were lifted and wrapping production right before everything shut down again. “We turned down actual paid work in a pandemic when we really needed it out of a belief that this would matter,” Roe explained. Earning the moment Two Distant Strangers manages a difficult tonal balance between moments of levity and the recurring trauma of police killings, with the end result reflecting the duality of Free’s script and careful editing from Dirty Robber. “It had to reflect the reality of Black life. When you think about someone like Daunte Wright, who was on his way to a car wash getting ready for his kid’s birthday, those were moments of joy when he had no thought of losing his life,” Free explained. “The moment you see those police lights, that changes. I wanted to reflect how quickly that joy can turn into a nightmare.” Pulling that off onscreen required nuance. Dirty Robber had to revisit an early approach to tone down some romantic comedy conceits in order to ensure that the film’s first abrupt shift didn’t leave viewers feeling betrayed. “I made a mistake in preproduction because I thought it would be fun if the romantic comedy sections played things up musically and stylistically,” Roe said. While elements of that visual style remained, the audio had the opposite intended effect, breaking trust with the audience at a crucial moment. “It would have upended the film,” he continued. “We knew it was the anchor point of the film, and we had to earn this.” The ride home The short film’s third act features Carter receiving a ride home from the officer who has repeatedly murdered him. The two recognize each other’s humanity as the car takes a left turn, leaving audiences without easy answers and dramatizing the systemic nature of the problem. So what would it take for Carter to get home safe to his dog? “When we can all agree that the system is broken is when we can begin to fix it,” Free said. The film is intentional about tying what’s onscreen to the real-world, including a rooftop mural of recent victims of police violence and a list of victims at the film’s conclusion. It directly places viewers at a crossroads between the fictional story they just watched and its nonfictional inspiration. “The events of the film happen so often [that] over the course of promoting the film you can see multiple cases,” Free said, “which is unbelievably sad in its own right.” Accepting the Oscar on Sunday night, Free commented on the real-life problem at hand. “Today the police will kill three people, tomorrow the police will kill three people, the day after that the police will kill three people.” The Silence From Brands Not Taking a Stand During Black History Month Is Deafening