Join Media Burn Archive on Thursday, Nov. 9 at 6pm CT for a screening of Bill Morrison’s new short film Incident, followed by a q&a with Morrison and Jamie Kalven.

Although Morrison is best known for films that excavate old, discarded footage to reveal forgotten histories and ancient, uncannily beautiful images such as Decasia (2002) and Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017), Incident is as timely and urgent as any other work of 2023. The video is just as much a work of media archaeology as any of Morrison’s previous celluloid-based efforts, with Morrison creating a compilation that examines all available footage from the “incident” of the title: on July 14, 2018, Chicago police officer Dillan Halley shot local barber Harith Augustus five times, leaving him to die in the street. Halley would claim the shooting was self-defense and received a 2-day suspension for failing to activate his body camera.

Using only audio and video taken from the scene, Morrison reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, in which rationalizations, misunderstandings, and lies quickly set in among both police officers and witnesses. 

After the screening, Morrison will be in conversation with Jamie Kalven, the founder of Invisible Institute, whose reporting was essential to challenging the official police narrative of Augustus’s killing, as well as the police killing of Laquan McDonald.