Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story

You may think you know the story, but the accumulation of detail, in new interviews and video and audio clips in this six-part documentary from producer Shawn Carter (also known to the world as musician and mogul Jay-Z), begins like a light snow fall and turns into a bracing nor’easter.

Gutting. ... Rest in Power is more than just a record of Martin’s brief life and shocking death: It’s a call to action. Furst and Willoughby Nason’s work is an overwhelming collage of interviews, audio recordings and video footage, expertly stitched together to tell the story of a Skittles-carrying black teenager who was confronted by a paranoid neighborhood watchman and shot during their altercation.

A potent, moving six-part documentary offering fresh insight into the 2012 killing of unarmed teen Martin by 28-year-old vigilante George Zimmerman. ... It’s the way in which directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason connect new and old details of the case with its wide-spread effect that makes Rest in Power a comprehensive, emotional and brutally honest look at America since that fatal shooting.

Rest in Power is a representative collage. A turning point in some ways, a reminder of what hasn’t changed in others, it’s a time capsule for a country where this could not only happen, but happen again.

It’s all far too much to cover in 44 minutes, and the last episode of Rest in Power feels like a conversation that gets cut off mid-sentence. What started as an effort to record a moment in history became, by the end, a documentary of the moment we’re living now. If ever a series had enough material for a second season, sadly this is it.

The series, directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason and produced by Jay-Z, doesn’t add much new information to the existing narrative. It doesn’t need to. Instead, it takes a heartbreaking, in-depth look at the shooting more than six years later—and the state of race relations in America today.