MOVIE REVIEW
“Let the Fire Burn”
Grade: A
Directed by Jason Osder.
Not rated. At Landmark Midtown. 95 minutes.
Bottom line: A mesmerizing documentary with a tense story line
By David Lewis
San Francisco Chronicle
”Let the Fire Burn,” a searing documentary about the long-simmering standoff between the radical black commune MOVE and the city of Philadelphia, uses no narrators, talking heads or fancy graphics to tell its devastating story.
It doesn’t need to.
Instead, director Jason Osder and his excellent editor, Nels Bangerter, rely solely on archival footage — TV news, city hearings, depositions, a MOVE film, etc. — to spin an incendiary yet balanced film that culminates in a tragic 1985 conflagration that leaves 11 people (five of them children) dead and 61 homes in ashes.
It’s mesmerizing from the get-go, and you will find yourself admiring how the filmmakers have woven all these archival threads into a cohesive, tense story line.
The film opens in the mid-1970s, when MOVE members are setting up shop in Philadelphia. They come off as a hippy-dippy, black separatist cult, and though a neighborhood nuisance, aren’t a huge issue until conservative Mayor Frank Rizzo makes them a huge issue. So the decade-long feud begins, extending into the mayoral term of Wilson Goode.
Though the film avoids judgments, you would not want the increasingly bellicose MOVE folks for neighbors, unless you enjoy loudspeakers blaring obscenities at all hours, naked children wandering around or debris strewn everywhere. (The mostly black neighbors of MOVE complained about the group.)
Likewise, you would not want these often knee-jerk Philadelphia officials patrolling your streets or in charge during a crisis — or anywhere near you, for that matter. (Did the cops really need to shoot 10,000 rounds of ammunition into the house, when they knew children were inside?)
Whatever you may feel about each side, it’s hard to watch as the city orders explosives to be dropped on the MOVE house (which has a bunker on top) — and then sits idly by as the resulting fire burns the entire neighborhood. You’ll keep asking yourself: How did it come to this? And hauntingly, no one has any answers.
