‘The Hate U Give’ puts Black Lives Matter on the screen

TORONTO (AP) — In a wave of films at the Toronto International Film Festival, the kinds of police brutality-inflicted tragedies that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement are being filtered into fiction film with anguished and stirring passion.

Many filmmakers are seeking to capture the humanity beneath the headlines, explicitly confronting the racial fissures in American society while channeling the sorrow and outrage of generations of black Americans.

“The Hate U Give,” adapted from Angie Thomas’ best seller, is about a 16-year-old girl whose childhood friend is shot by a police officer when he reaches for a hair brush. Reinaldo Marcus Green’s “Monsters and Men” has similarities to the killing of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who was choked and killed by police after being approached for selling single cigarettes.