My Nephew Emmett (2017)

Directed by: Kevin Wilson Jr. | 20 minutes | short film, drama | Actors: Dorian Davis, Jasmine Guy, Emily Hooper, Tylon Larry, Ethan Leaverton, William Perkins, Dane Rhodes, Chris Steele, LB Williams, Joshua Wright, Charlie Talbert

Nobel laureates Bob Dylan and Toni Morrisson wrote a song and a play about him respectively, writer and opinion maker James Baldwin was inspired by his account for his play “Blues for Mister Charlie,” and his old school was named after him in 2006. Emmett Till was barely fourteen years old but managed to touch many. The Chicago-born boy was staying with his great-uncle Moses Wright in Mississippi in 1955. Before he left, his mother urged Emmett to “stick to his manners,” especially towards the whites. She explicitly asked her son to watch out for the whites in Mississippi: “If you have to kneel and bow when a white passes by, then do it.” Despite that warning, young Emmett still went wrong. The local grocer’s wife claimed that he had behaved inappropriately towards her. On the evening of August 28, 1955, the grocer and his half-brother broke into Moses Wright’s home and kidnapped Emmett. A few days later, the boy was found dead, badly mutilated. It would later turn out that the grocer had largely made up the allegations…

The gruesome murder of Emmett Till is the inspiration for the short film ‘My Nephew Emmett’ (2017), the graduation project of film student Kevin Wilson Jr. The twenty-minute short immediately earned him the gold medal at the Student Academy Awards, and is also one of the contenders for the Oscar for Best Short Live Action Feature. Wilson knows Till’s history inside out; he also wrote a successful play about it. The story is told from the perspective of Emmett’s great-uncle Moses Wright (played by LB Williams), who is responsible for the boy. A conversation at the local waterhole leads him to suspect that Emmett (Joshua Wright) has gotten himself into trouble. That suspicion becomes reality when white men break into his house that night. Moses has to and wants to protect his grandnephew, but feels powerless against the white force majeure. Williams plays him as a man who has learned to survive throughout his life, who walks in step without losing his dignity and self-control. That his grandnephew would have flown out of the corner is a big stain on his immaculate blazon.

Williams has a captivating headline drawn over the years that you can’t stop looking at, and Wilson films it in moody colors. The fact that ‘My Nephew Emmett’ doesn’t seem quite ‘finished’ and a great actress like Jasmine Guy (as Moses’ wife Elizabeth) gets lost in it doesn’t detract from the film as a whole. What impresses most, however, are the archive footage of the real Moses Wright, with which Wilson concludes his film. These are images that give rise to goosebumps, because they emphasize once again that the murder of Emmett Till really happened and confront us once again, in view of #BlackLivesMatter, that more than 60 years later, we still need to fight for equal rights. .