Southland

Jackie Ishida, a young Japanese-American woman, is in her last term of school when her grandfather, Frank Sakai, unexpectedly dies. Frank was a veteran of the Second World War who, many years before, had owned a store in one of the first neighbourhoods to become truly integrated, and which was now the heart of L.A.‘s black community. Jackie discovers by chance that four black teenagers had been killed in the store during the Watts Riots of 1965, and that the murders were never solved or reported. Along with James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, she tries to piece together the story of the boys’ deaths and, in doing so, unearths the long-held secrets of her family’s history - and her own. Exploring the fragile understandings and sometimes painful misunderstandings that occur across the fault-lines of race and culture, and moving in and out of the past and present, this is also a story of a city in flux - a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.