Array to release Director Débora Souza Silva’s ‘For Our Children’ on May 10 on Netflix
Hitting Netflix on May 10 from Array Releasing in filmmaker Débora Souza Silva’s For Our Children. The film is a radical love letter to generations past and present centering two mothers, Reverend Johnson and Angela Williams, whose lives have been forever altered by police violence against their sons. Ms. Silva’s emotional chronicle of remembrance and resilience delicately demonstrates how to pay forward lessons learned even in the aftermath of unthinkable tragedy.
Wanda Johnson and Angela Williams, mothers of young Black men victimized by police brutality, come together and build a network of community-led support, mutual aid, and healing in Débora Souza Silva’s trenchant documentary spanning Oakland’s Fruitvale to the American South. Long before George Floyd’s murder and the BLM protests in 2020, Oscar Grant’s 2009 killing by a BART police officer seeded public awareness and cultural consciousness of systemic racism and its discontents.
Paying forward lessons learned and advocating against anti-Black violence in memory of her son, Oscar, Wanda Johnson holds space for Angela Williams, whose teen son, Ulysses, survives a brutal police attack in Troy, Alabama, living to tell his story. When a grand jury fails to indict the Alabama officer who attacked her son, Angela decides to conduct her own investigation. Under Wanda’s mentorship, Angela, the latest “unwilling” member of this movement, embarks upon a quest to locate the footage and secure justice for her son. Together, their experiences illuminate not only the U.S.’s cycle of racist state-sanctioned violence, but the cycle of courage and care that Black mothers have cultivated to protect themselves and their families.
Silva’s work has been featured on PBS, BBC and Fusion. In 2021, she received the Creative Capital Award. She was also honored by the National Association of Black Journalists, which presented her with the Les Payne Founder’s Award.
David Felix Sutcliffe and Adina Luo serve as the documentary’s producers. Loi Ameera Almeron worked as co-producer, and Myah Overstreet, David Magdael and Vince Johnson are the film’s associate producers.