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A 21st-Century Lynching Film Explores the Legacy of Racial Violence
This 2019 festival fave shines a light on race in modern-day America
Southern swingsets bear strange fruit.
On August 29, 2014, 17-year-old high schooler Lennon Lacy was found dead and hanging from playground equipment near his home in Bladenboro, North Carolina. His death was ruled a suicide, despite evidence that generated more questions than watertight conclusions. But Lacy’s family, anchored by his tireless mother Claudia, continue to ask those questions, with the aid of Durham, North Carolina filmmaker Jacqueline Olive.
The mysterious death of Lacy — an affable, strapping teen who loved football, sneakers, and an adult White woman — forms the core of Jacqueline Olive’s documentary, “Always in Season.” The film, which won a 2019 Sundance Festival Special Jury Award for Moral Urgency earlier this year, will have a limited theatrical release starting Sept. 20 in New York and other cities before it is broadcast as part of the PBS “Independent Lens” series in early 2020.
“Always in Season” draws a discomfiting line between Lacy’s death and lynchings from earlier eras. Indeed, the film asks whether lynching ever really ceased in the United States, or if it simply morphed into barely updated forms of racial…
