Hot Docs 2026: #WhileBlack Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

In the traditional media era, news would be disseminated through filtered stations: newsstands and broadcasters. However, advances in technology have drastically changed that landscape. In the 1990s, handycams became popular, followed by digital cameras, and smartphones. The ability to film events became a new modality in the documenting of everyday life, allowing anyone to record any event at any time. Along those lines, directors Sidney Fussell and Jennifer Holness approach the filming of Black violence in #WhileBlack, a documentary about the modernization of livestreams and the documentation of police brutality. The starting point is the historical aftermath of the assassination of George Floyd in 2020. Throughout a cellphone video recorded by seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier, the whole world watched during the COVID lockdown the brutal murder of a Black man perpetrated by a police officer on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Through the film, the directors aim to analyze how social media profits from Black suffering, similar to that of broadcast corporations have over past decades, transferring this capital now to megacorporations, like Meta, which licenses some of this footage for institutions and enterprises. Even if Black individuals record these moments, corporations will spread that imagery across other platforms, without paying those who captured that footage. Consequently, across these same platforms, Frazier’s footage reached approximately 1.5 billion views in less than two weeks. A then high schooler captured one of the most vital images of the century, highlighted by the engines of corporations profiting from the suffering of Black people. However, this has been the case since the 1600s, where White Europeans trafficked Black individuals and enriched themselves from their labor. 

The basis of the documentary is the reports by Frazier, who streamed the death of George Floyd, and Diamond Reynold, who filmed the murder of another Black man at the hand of the police, Philando Castile, in the early era of Facebook Live. Lives changed completely throughout their witnessing of both crimes, Reynold had her four-year-old daughter in the car when the police officer killed Castile. An essential passage highlights the indiscriminate use of her footage in Netflix shows, YouTube, and other media, claiming her video as their own. Opposite to the Rodney King case, where the one who captured the infamous video profited from it, the suffering of Black individuals has since become public and therefore, free. 

#WhenBlack sees directors Sidney Fussell and Jennifer Holness study the footage of this violence, and highlighting how these acts are now used to generate profits for megacorporations. However, the inexperienced of Fussell, making her directorial debut here, provides an often uninteresting project about how modern recordings have changed society, leading to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite a short runtime of only 80-minutes, the film often feels longer. Still, the film offers audiences a crucial look at the importance of technology as a media tool, using its potential to document the cruelty of the state’s forces. 

still courtesy of Hot Docs

If you liked this, please read our other reviews here and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or Instagram or like us on Facebook.

Pedro Lima

Brazilian film writer. He is also a producer and executive producer for Zariah Filmes. Member of the International Film Society Critics Association (IFSCA), International Documentary Association (IDA), and Gotham and Media Film Institute.