The US filmmaker Nathan Truesdell specialises in deploying archival footage to shine a light on local government incompetence and malfeasance – often to droll, tragicomic effect. For his most recent film, When the LAPD Blows Up Your Neighborhood, he trains his pointed editing skills on an incident from 30 June 2021 in which the Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad detonated some 42 pounds of confiscated fireworks in a residential, working-class neighbourhood. The resulting explosion destroyed the armoured vehicle intended to contain it, injuring 17 and badly damaging many nearby homes. Weaving together local news reports and footage from press conferences, Truesdell untangles the web of carelessness and incompetence that led to the explosion, as well as the lack of accountability and inadequate response that followed.
Director: Nathan Truesdell
Producers: Will Lennon, Kat Nguyen
videoHistory
In Stalin’s home city in Georgia, generations clash over his legacy
20 minutes
videoEconomics
A tour of New York’s gaudiest neighbourhood with the Marxist geographer David Harvey
13 minutes
videoEngineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
videoFairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes
videoFairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes
videoFairness and equality
Visit the small Texas community that lives in the shadow of SpaceX launches
14 minutes
videoArt
The sprawling mural that depicts an unflinching people’s history of Los Angeles
7 minutes
videoArt
In his poem ‘London’, William Blake crafted a bleak vision of the city he loved
9 minutes
videoPolitical philosophy
Beyond the veil – what rules would govern John Rawls’s ‘realistic Utopia’?
6 minutes