The powerful short documentary Incident opens on a quiet midsummer evening in Chicago’s South Shore. The stillness is abruptly broken as a man dashes into the street, stumbling before he twists and falls. A seagull flutters past, startled—mirroring the viewer’s sense of confusion and unease. This striking moment sets the stage for Chicago-born Bill Morrison’s latest film, which delves into the 2018 killing of 37-year-old barber Harith Augustus by Chicago police.
Through police body camera footage, surveillance, and observation footage, Morrison reveals the unsettling gap between the raw, unfiltered images and the official narrative that cleared officers of wrongdoing.
Known for his signature use of archival footage to unearth hidden truths, Morrison transforms these recordings into a powerful meditation on perception, accountability, and the passage of time. Incident has drawn widespread acclaim, earning top honors from the International Documentary Association and Cinema Eye Honors.
With a 2025 Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short, the film further establishes Morrison as a master of reexamining history through the lens of forgotten or suppressed imagery. Watch the trailer below:
Morrison has built a celebrated career out of resurrecting forgotten images, earning him the title of “the poet laureate of lost films” (The New York Times, 2021). His work, often weaving decayed and archival footage into powerful cinematic experiences, has premiered at top festivals including Sundance, Telluride, Venice, and New York.
His groundbreaking Decasia (2002) became the first film of the 21st century inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, while The Great Flood (2013) earned the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for historical scholarship. His acclaimed Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) appeared on over 100 best-of-the-year lists and was later recognized as one of the decade’s finest by The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair.
A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alpert Award, Morrison has also secured production grants from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Arté – La Lucarne. In 2014, The Museum of Modern Art honored him with a mid-career retrospective. In 2021, he was inducted into the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Morrison remains a singular voice in cinema, reshaping history one lost frame at a time. Reel Chicago had a chance to talk to the acclaimed director the week before he finds out if Incident will win the Oscar.
Bill, what initially drew you to the story of Harith Augustus?
The Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago-based journalist Jamie Kalven is an old family friend of mine. We grew up in the Kenwood neighborhood, a couple blocks from one another, albeit separated by a generation. Jamie graduated from the University of Chicago Laboratory High School in 1965, the same year I was born. I graduated from U-High in 1983.
In recent years, our career interests began to dovetail. My film work became more documentary, and more grounded in social issues. With his journalistic work on police oversight, Jamie’s practice had become increasingly involved in examining police videos and suing for their release to the public through the Freedom of Information Act.
I recall one time that we randomly met on the street when I was home visiting my mother in Chicago. I mentioned to him this idea of writing a modern-day Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) in which each retelling of a crime would be from a different type of camera and would represent a different point of view—an iPhone, a surveillance camera, a dashboard camera, closed- circuit TV, a body cam. They would all tell a different truth.
After the police killing of Harith Augustus in 2018, Jamie wrote about the case in a series of articles that appeared in The Intercept and produced six videos entitled Six Durations of a Split Second in collaboration with Forensic Architecture out of London.
In 2022 CPD finally released perhaps the most damning of the police videos of the Augustus killing, the one in which a dashboard camera captures PPO Dillan Halley is seen firing five shots at Augustus as he flees into the street. With it, they also released over 20 hours of footage associated with the July 2018 shooting. In the wake of this data dump, Kalven revisited the case, writing an epilogue that appeared in The Intercept in August 2022, In The Aftermath of a Police Killing The Justifications Begin Immediately.
A few weeks after the article appeared, Jamie wrote a note to my family: “Several years ago, Bill and I had a conversation about the possibility of
creating a film that told a story solely through body camera footage. That remains an intriguing idea. This piece suggests some of the dramatic possibilities.” I remember my mom, Kate Morrison (1932-2025), 90 years old at the time, asking me if I had read Jamie’s article yet.
Jamie had included clips of the footage that had been released, and used them like footnotes to illustrate the conversations he described, as captured by police body worn cameras. I downloaded their source from the YouTube channel administered by COPA (Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability) and began to play around with them. I saw that you could tell the story from many different angles continuously and synchronously.
So I started applying rules. One of the rules was that one should always be able to see Augustus, alive or dead, so he is pretty much visible from the moment the police encounter happens until he’s carried away in the ambulance. Following this, I continued with a rough edit, synchronizing clips that overlapped and editing them into a four-quadrant format which allowed multiple views, including one of Augustus.
I showed Jamie a rough treatment of what I planned to do with this footage, and he got excited by what he saw and gave me his blessing to continue along with all the footage that had been released on the case – some 20 hours of surveillance, dashboard, and body-worn cameras of all the officers who reported to the scene. With that, I began a new edit. I wrote to Jamie that I thought we had found our Rashomon.
With Incident, you use contemporary surveillance and police body-cam footage. What was the challenge in applying your signature style to such recent material?
I never think of my work as an “applied signature style.” Rather I choose my source material judiciously based on how I think it will resonate artistically, narratively and formally. I have had the good fortune in my career to have rarefied access to nitrate footage that hasn’t been viewed in generations.
And I have used that footage, to a greater or lesser extent, to comment on the human condition. Stories that are held in an archive may reflect a greater truth about that archive, and the world that has archived them.
I would say that the similarity Incident has with my previous work is how the films question how, and why, this obscure and forgotten footage ultimately made it to us now. Why are we seeing it now? Why had it been archived?
How is the path it took to being seen now reflected in the footage we are watching. The visual decay is a manifestation of the time that it has spent reaching us – its historicity.
I immediately recognized this contemporary video material as unique in this regard, in terms of how it told a story that also self-reflexively engaged with the media that was being used to tell that story. I also saw that it was hiding in plain sight the flood of similar images that are recorded every day. Without someone to point to it, its obsolescence lies in its being labeled by its keepers as unremarkable, as nothing we need to examine further.
In my previous work, Dawson City: Frozen Time uses the films found in a disused swimming pool in the Yukon to tell the story of how those films got there and how they were recovered. In so doing, it also tells the story of Western Capitalist Expansion.
Similarly, the backstory about how and why this police footage became available to the public is important to our understanding of what we are witnessing, as well as how the presence of these cameras, and a publicly accessible archive, ultimately affects the performance of the officers involved. In so doing, it retells the story of Apartheid America.
How did you approach editing and structuring the film to ensure it was both immersive and ethically responsible in presenting such a tragic event?
One of the parameters of the film was that I exclusively used police footage that was released to the public. In this way, it frames the material as something available to all of us to make with what we will.
The police had successfully reframed the narrative around this footage. First they created a false narrative on the spot that was immediately accepted as truth without asking for or considering the testimony of any of the eyewitnesses present.
They later isolated a frame of videotape in which Augustus appears to be reaching for his gun, and published that image in the news the next day, effectively swaying public opinion and defusing the gathering public outrage around the incident. We were told that the police had acted within the mandate of their job, in which they had to make a split-second decision to use lethal force. The archive of images, we were told, had already been examined and the officers were found not liable.
What this film does is re-examine that archive, taking into consideration the entire of chain of events leading up to that moment. It shows that Augustus was complying with police and showing them a valid gun owner’s license when he was jumped by three officers with their weapons drawn.
It also shows that Augustus had already been fired on by Halley when that single frame showing him touching the holster of his gun was captured. Most importantly, it shows that Augustus’ gun remained in its holster throughout the chain of events, before it was removed by an officer from his dead body.
What is and what is not ethically responsible must be seen in this light. Is it ethically responsible to accept the police declaration that Augustus reached for his gun several times and that he presented a threat to the officers? If we don’t define what happened in terms that are acceptable to any viewer, why are we recording these events in the first place?
We need to at least agree that this was a tragic and avoidable mistake on the part of the police if we hope to learn from such incidents and avoid them occurring in the future. We need to look at the entire event and not parse the evidence to meet a preconceived conclusion. That is what being ethically responsible entails, and we need to demand that our police do a better job of it.
When we premiered the film in Chicago at the Chicago Humanities Festival in November 2023, Harith’s mother and stepfather attended the screening. The family had never responded to any requests for interviews from the press, refusing to grieve in public.
This screening, coming over 5 years after the death of their son, and after losing a civil trial for wrongful death, was the first time his mother addressed the public. After the film was screened, she was introduced by Jamie, who said “Now the world can see what happened to my son”. Turning to us she said, “And it’s up to you to get this story out to the world.” She and her husband will also be in the audience at the Dolby Theater on Sunday, March 2, 2025.
This is your first Oscar nomination, what does this recognition mean to you, and how do you see it influencing the future of your projects?
I’m not sure how it will affect me or my future projects. I appreciate the recognition for this piece, especially for the attention it has afforded the issues it explores. I certainly never dreamed my work would be seen in this context, so I am enjoying that aspect of it as well, while also suspecting that Hell may have finally frozen over.
How did the city itself shape the film’s narrative, and do you see yourself working on more Chicago-centered stories in the future?
As mentioned above, I grew up in Kenwood, about three miles from where Incident took place. I have a sister who lives in Hyde Park, as did my mother before she passed earlier this month. While I live in New York, I return to Chicago at least four or five times a year, and it is deep in my DNA and self-image. I regularly run the Chicago Marathon, and I exclusively, and helplessly, follow Chicago sports teams (Bears, Bulls, and White Sox.). My lone bumper sticker reads I ❤ The Point.
I have followed Jamie’s reporting for years, on the Harith Augustus case and Laquan McDonald case before it, as well as his continuing efforts to expose police abuse and public housing dysfunction in Chicago. Our friendship and shared vision have grown enormously throughout this project and we both look forward to working together on Chicago projects in the future.
See if Bill wins the Oscar Incident this Sunday when the Academy Awards, hosted by Conan O’Brien, airs this Sunday on ABC and Hulu at 7 PM CT.
Colin Costello is the West Coast Editor of Reel 360. Contact him at colin@reel360.com or follow him on Twitter at @colinthewriter1
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