POLICE BEAT
dir. Robinson Devor, 2005
United States. 90 min.
In English, and Wolof with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, JUNE 14 – 3 PM followed by Q+A with Charles Mudede and Robinson Devor

Adapted from Mudede’s eponymous police blotter column in The Stranger, Devor’s second feature follows the misadventures of a West African immigrant-turned-bike cop named Z (played by professional footballer Pape Sidy Niang) in Y2K-era Seattle. After his white girlfriend leaves town on a camping trip with another man, Z experiences a bigger detachment from his alleged calling, hollowing out the high-minded principles of law and order he nevertheless espouses in a voiceover monologue across the film (crucially delivered in his native language of Wolof). The banality of his work leads to an unvarnished, Kafkaesque meditation on Seattle that is starkly beautiful yet also gives face to its bourgeois indifference. This is a major switch-up from the customary Hollywood depiction of the city as a liberated technopolis, and also rebuffs Seattle’s self-image as a progressive melting pot; POLICE BEAT’s fearless depiction of Z’s alienation anticipates what we call inceldom today, as well as the overall atomization of culture that would ramp up in the 2010s and 2020s.

“POLICE BEAT is an object so gorgeously odd, and so completely at peace with its own oddness, it’s hard to compare it to anything else. One could say a kinder, gentler David Lynch, but that skews the emphasis a little too much toward the shock of the otherworldly. Devor steps into Lynchian Americana, but chooses to keep one foot in the real. The result is a deceptively quiet, and completely genuine, thing of beauty.” – Chris Chang, Film Comment

“It’s enough of a feat to find genuinely new ways of rendering heartbreak and longing, but POLICE BEAT manages that and more. Gorgeously photographed and startlingly addictive, mesmerizing and mysterious, Robinson Devor’s unlikely-sounding triumph is a sensual immersion into the consciousness of a lovelorn Senegalese-American cop in Seattle.” – Nicolas Rapold, New York Sun