Fruitvale Station(2013)
dir. Ryan Coogler
The last day of Oscar Grant, in full.
Where to watch: Starz via Apple TV channel and Amazon channels (subscription); rent $3.99 on Amazon, Apple TV and Fandango At Home (JustWatch US, Sept 2026)Letterboxd ↗
On New Year's Eve 2008, Oscar Grant spends the last day of his life with his daughter, his girlfriend and his mother, trying to be better than he has been. He's shot by a transit police officer on a BART platform in Oakland a few hours after midnight. Coogler made it as his first feature, and it begins with the real cell phone video.
Why it’s here
The film gives a man who became a headline a whole day, and makes the viewer sit with how ordinary it was. What's punk is that it starts with the real video and refuses to turn him into a symbol. What's pedagogical is how it rebuilds a person from a statistic. Pairs with The Hate U Give, Just Mercy and the Dear White People pick. It is a dramatization and shows the shooting.
Where This Film Lives
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
Men We Reaped
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Five young men lost, and the town that let it be.
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Bud, Not Buddy
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An orphan, a suitcase, and the Great Depression.
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Ghost Boys
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A boy killed by police tells it himself.
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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
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A death row lawyer on who the law is for.
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Anger Is a Gift
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The anger you've been told to put down.
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Dear Martin
Nic Stone
Letters to MLK from a kid in handcuffs.
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Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Prisons as an economic fix, not a crime fix.
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Nectar in a Sieve
Kamala Markandaya
A farmer's wife, a tannery, and a village lost.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST