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When They See Us review – Netflix's gut-wrenching tale of the Central Park Five

Ava DuVernay pulls no punches in this urgent, astonishing retelling of an assault case that opened a window on injustice in America

Director Ava DuVernay doesn’t spend long establishing the normality of the lives of young teenagers Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise and Raymond Santana. Where others might have chosen to insist upon it, she takes it as a given – as the boys did, before that fateful night in 1989 when they joined a crowd of other boys streaming to the park from Harlem and became, through a nightmarish concatenation of events, for ever subsumed under a collective identity. They are the Central Park Five.

When They See Us is a dramatised account of how the five young boys came to be arrested, convicted and sentenced for raping and beating almost to death Trisha Meili – “the Central Park jogger” – a young white woman whose poor, battered body was found that same night.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/315UYqC
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