In 2019, St. Louis, Missouri experienced the highest per capital murder rate of any city in the United States, a sobering statistic whose resolution was made all the more pressing by the fact that 13 of those deaths recorded over that summer were children. Within the first three hours of 2020, the city had already tallied five shooting deaths. These facts are dropped five minutes into director Ben Scholle’s documentary Catching Bullets, which chronicles the intrepid efforts of a few key members of the St. Louis community to remedy the issue.
Catching Bullets opens with its most powerful image: that of a group of men pushing a coffin down the middle of a city street in the Anti-Violence March of October 2020, one of many protests that year pushing back against violence targeted primarily against the Black community (another tragic stat that the doc later illuminates: in 2020, a Black person in St. Louis was nearly as likely to die from a gunshot wound as from COVID-19). The rest of the footage that comprises Catching Bullets doesn’t quite reach this height of visual poetry, but it doesn’t need to. The film benefits from its clear-eyed, straight-forward approach, zeroing in primarily on the intimate conversations (which often play out at length) between experienced St. Louis community leaders and the young people they are mentoring in an effort to curb the perpetuation of violent crime. Catching Bullets finds its through-line in two individuals in particular: Darren Seals, a former dope dealer who was shot 13 times throughout his youth but now, in his mid-50s, is committed to breaking the cycle of violence he was once a part of, and Preston “Tink” Jones, an 18-year-old constantly pulled by the allure of fast cash that dealing brings, despite the warnings from Seals and others. The push-and-pull between the two men— one who’s been through it all and come out the other side, one who’s teetering on the brink of oblivion— deftly illustrates the situation’s intergenerational impact.
Seals— whose advocacy also included work for such organizations as the since-folded city-funded group Cure Violence— purchased the abandoned Rose Hill Missionary Baptist Church in 2020 with the intention of turning it into the headquarters for his Sankofa Unity Center, a group dedicated to mentoring local youth to prevent them from becoming part of the problem. Located in Walnut Park, Seals’ home and one of several North St. Louis neighborhoods cited as accounting for nearly half of the city’s annual homicides, the church is the center around which the action of Catching Bullets— shot largely between 2020 and 2022— orbits. Harnessing his knowledge and experience as a former gang member who served prison time and employing it for a new purpose (this includes filming a reenactment of the first time he was shot to use as an educational tool), Seals interacts with the young people in his community with both candidness and empathy, teaching them useful practical skills (pouring cement, tuckpointing) as they renovate the church in the meantime, granting them a sense of purpose beyond the streets. Seals is the sort of down-to-earth, inspirational figure it’s easy to almost immediately get behind, and the bracing realism of these moments that the film drops in on— complex discussions about yearning for revenge, killings over petty conflicts, the fallout from stray bullet fire— effectively comprise the bulk of the film with little supplementary material required. They’re only occasionally interrupted by strategically-placed social media videos, news conferences, and cell phone footage depicting a shooting’s aftermath that further demonstrate the urgency of the situation (in a scene that can’t help but be read with a wry tone, a news conference in which St. Louis’ then-mayor Tishaura Jones attempts to express optimism over the resolution of a violent crime is interrupted by the popping of distant gunfire).
Catching Bullets manages to ably accomplish a feat that’s always difficult for films exploring an ongoing situation: locating a satisfying endpoint for its main characters that conveys a sense of achievement, while acknowledging that there’s still a lot of work to be done. For instance, by the end of 2021, the Walnut Park neighborhood saw a 64% drop in homicides, while the murder rate in St. Louis as a whole decreased to its pre-pandemic high. But statistically, that’s still one of the highest in the nation, while programs like Cure Violence were ended for their lack of effectiveness. But Seals, along with everyone else involved in this film (Preston’s mother Precious Jones, for instance, ends up founding Breaking Generational Poverty, a non-profit dedicated to gun violence and gang prevention), are part of that positive change. Catching Bullets is the product of a volunteer effort by producers Scholle and Derrick Phillips to create media content for various local community organizations dedicated to curbing violence in St. Louis. By illuminating possible solutions to the problem for the public in an engaging and easily-digestible way, Catching Bullets becomes an agent of change itself.
Catching Bullets will have a special public screening at the 24:1 Cinema in Pagedale, Missouri on August 14, and will be available to stream on Amazon, Tubi, and other digital platforms beginning on August 15. Runtime: 84 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 