Let The Fire Burn

In 1985, the Philadelphia police department dropped four pounds of C4 explosives on a row house in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood. Eleven people living in the house, including five children, died, and and 61 houses (mostly inhabited by black families) were destroyed after the police decided to "let the fire burn." The bombing was a culmination of a years-long conflict between the city and a primitivist black liberation group called MOVE, which was, as this extraordinary documentary about the incident makes clear, something like a cult, but also the target of wholly disproportionate and unjustifiable violence from the Philadelphia PD. Director Jason Osder eschews present-day interviews and voice-overs, telling the whole story through archival footage, using testimonies before the panel appointed to investigate the incident to frame the story.