Critics reviews

I honestly can’t think of any other feature that captures my home state more accurately — and more beautifully. (In terms of accuracy, the only other contender is The Phenix City Story.)

What about the victim’s family? . . . Wilkerson rightly feels implicated in the history of that absence. In exploring it, his movie offers one of the best recent analyses of what virulent racism, and how we tell the story of that racism, accomplishes. It eviscerates. It incinerates. It can make entire histories, and the people therein, disappear.

The filmmaking is engaging and unsettling, as Wilkerson combines photographs, old film footage, text, and interviews to craft a portrait of the U.S. where racism and violence are never far from view.

That Wilkerson acknowledges the absurdity of his privileged position as the great-grandson of a murderer being paid to take photos of the crime scene doesn’t magically imbue those photos with any particular wisdom. His black-and-white images of cotton fields and pine-lined roads are beautiful — the South is beautiful — but too often they function in the film like slides in a PowerPoint presentation.

Though Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? could be described as essayistic, it's also a surprising, discursive, form-expanding work of art. . . . Only one element of the film — an entreaty to recognize the specific names of slain black men and women — doesn't carry over as forcefully from performance piece to documentary, but Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? remains a searing, one-of-a-kind creation.

Wilkerson's approach—half art installation, half solemn true-crime podcast, read over shots of trees and empty storefronts—is more aggravating than lucid, withholding information and observations for dramatic effect. For someone so gloomily aware of his own privilege, Wilkerson spends a lot of the film playing dumb and speculating—a writer's trick for giving shape to a piece with a thesis and no conclusion.

It's an extraordinary personal documentary. . . . The idea that drives Wilkerson's film is a powerful one, namely, that everyone's private life and family traditions are inseparable from politics, from ideology, from history—and that the unwillingness to do the practical, intellectual, and emotional work to find out the specifics of those connections and to face up to them is both a form of privilege and a perpetuation of injustice.

When I first saw Travis Wilkerson's intense, mesmerizing, and heartbreaking Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, it didn't yet technically count as a film: He narrated the work live and personally cued the images and audio as he proceeded. . . . That work is now a contained film all its own, and I am happy (happy?) to report that it has lost none of its discomfiting, embittered power.

In conducting this filmic exorcism, Wilkerson generates a wealth of incidental material that falls outside the purview of Spann's story.

With stylistic flair to burn in service to its point, the film still couldn't be further from the kind of feel-good film that tends to close a festival; and it was a brave choice with which to send us back out into our troubled times. Celebrate, and regenerate your common energies – but don't let a bubble of complacent hedonism close your eyes, this bookending suggested.

For the most part, Locarno's competition lineup was blessed with entries that were both aesthetically and politically challenging. Travis Wilkerson's Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? is a case in point. . . . Wilkerson avoids mere liberal guilt and self-flagellation by refusing to see Branch as an unfortunate aberration. His task is to connect the dots between his own family's personal anguish and the shameful American legacy of white supremacy.

[Wilkerson,] understandably affected by his personal involvement in the story he is narrating, seems to sacrifice political analysis in favour of an emotional duel with his family's demons. That being said, the film by no means replicates the reactionary banality and political correctness within which the discourse around race is conducted in the US. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? digs deep into the metastasis of racial discrimination to expose how far into the fabric of society it reaches.