Genre: Documentary
Actor: Beto O'Rourke, Craig Garnett, Meghann Garcia, Pete Luna, Sheila Jackson Lee
Director: Tomas Navia
1. Print It Black, 2024
Produced by ABC News, Print It Black is a documentary that opts for a straightforward approach instead of a stylish one. It’s more breaking news than investigative, more TV than film, but it works to highlight the urgent issue at hand. Well, two issues, which it sometimes clumsily handles. On the one hand, Print It Black is about the devastating Robb Elementary massacre and how the small town of Uvalde is further divided in the aftermath. On the other, it’s about the relevancy of the town paper, The Uvalde Leader-News, and the crucial role it plays at a time when more and more news publications are shutting down. At the intersection of these two stories is Kimberly Rubio, a staff reporter for the paper whose 10-year-old daughter was one of the victims of the massacre. Without Rubio, the two threads come undone and the documentary fails to feel like a cohesive story. Odd decisions, like leaving out the identity and motivations of the perpetrator and allotting virtually zero screentime to the other nine victims, start to become glaringly obvious. It’s a shame because both are worthy topics that deserve their own features; here, they seem unfairly smushed into a feature that’s unconfident about the way it handles them.