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Stand your ground case: Whose story will win?

 
A scene from 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, coming to HBO next week.
A scene from 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, coming to HBO next week.
Published Nov. 17, 2015

Watching 3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets is something of a Rorschach test, sussing out your feelings on "stand your ground" laws, racial bias and the fear that even a minor disagreement with a stranger might end with a gun barrel pointed in your direction.

The documentary — which premieres Monday on HBO — follows the trial of Michael Dunn, who shot into a carful of teenagers in Jacksonville in 2012 after a disagreement over loud rap music coming from their vehicle. Jordan Davis, 17, was killed.

Dunn maintained all along that the teens threatened him and aimed a shotgun in his direction (though no weapon was ever found by police). According to Dunn, he genuinely believed his life was in danger.

The teenagers tell a different story, of a man who pulled up next to them in a gas station parking lot and whom they regarded as a nuisance until he pulled out a handgun and started shooting.

That Dunn is white and the teenagers black is the undercurrent running through this tragedy.

Filmmaker Marc Singer got special permission to film in the courtroom from the judge. "I was allowed to stand at the back and film, and we also took a feed from two closed-captioned TV cameras in the courtroom,'' he told me.

Singer's presence makes a difference. This isn't just a static feed we're looking at. You can sense a filmmaker's instincts at work: Occasionally his camera will stray to the bailiffs posted around the room, and their micro-expressions are telling. These are details that do not usually surface in courtroom footage, but they are precisely what gives the movie its texture and complexity and humanity.

"I was focused on the witness stand, the judge and the cutaways," Singer said. "I began to seek out the slightest moments of drama via the body language of the people in the room. I think, all in all, they are very revealing and the court scenes feel very cinematic."

Here's where the inkblot test comes in: When the surviving teens and Jordan's girlfriend take the stand, they shed no tears, betray no emotion. When Dunn takes the stand, he can barely keep it together. So, how do you interpret that?

If you're inclined to side with Dunn, maybe the prosecution's witnesses come off as emotionless, indifferent and detached (thugs, in Dunn's estimation), whereas Dunn is still so clearly traumatized by the whole thing.

If you see Dunn's actions as murder (which the jury ultimately did), those teenagers on the stand seem downright stoic in the face of tragedy while Dunn sheds his crocodile tears — swallowing his sobs over the misplaced belief that he, not Jordan Davis, is the true victim in this case. Dunn is so weepy that he can't even get through the first few minutes of questioning from his own attorney without choking up when asked simply to offer up the name of his dog.

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"Conceptually I was considering that what happens in a trial is really the telling of two stories, one by the prosecution and one by the defense," Singer said. "And whilst we are reminded by the seal in the courtroom that 'In God We Trust,' sitting there filming the trial, it felt more like, 'He who tells the best story wins.' Essentially the trial is a war of competing narratives about one moment in time where people's paths crossed and lives were irreversibly changed."