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Out of the fire, the story

A new documentary about the MOVE tragedy is pieced together from footage of the 1985 event.

Eleven people died and 61 homes were destroyed in the bombing.
Eleven people died and 61 homes were destroyed in the bombing.Read more

Jason Osder was 11, a kid at the Miquon School, when the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb on the MOVE house at 6221 Osage Ave. in West Philadelphia.

It was May 13, 1985. By the end of the night, six adult members of the Afrocentric back-to-nature organization - long in conflict with city officials, with police, with neighbors - were dead. So were five children, trapped inside the house. And 60 other rowhouses in the surrounding area had been destroyed by a fire left unchecked.

"The message your parents and your teachers try to convey is 'Play by the rules, do everything right, and things will work out OK.' And then something like this happens, and it just cracks that shell," says Osder, who was deeply shaken by the events of that night, and whose documentary about the MOVE conflagration, Let the Fire Burn, has its world premiere Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

"I was frightened," says Osder, who grew up in Erdenheim, Montgomery County, and could see the smoke looming over the city that evening. "I was frightened that kids died. I don't think I saw it in the way that most adults did - that is, through the lens of race relations, or the lens of class, or the lens of police brutality. All of those are issues that adults think about.

"I was just a kid, and kids were killed and their parents didn't help them and the police didn't help them, and that was scary to me. I thought, 'Could that happen to me?' "

Osder, 39, is an assistant professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He has spent more than 10 years working on his film, which boldly eschews traditional documentary tools - narration, talking-head interviews, B-roll - and instead relies exclusively on found footage. There is archival video from the MOVE Commission, appointed by Mayor Wilson Goode to investigate the catastrophe that happened on his watch. There are TV news reports. There is a haunting deposition interview with 13-year-old Birdie Africa (now Michael Moses Ward), the sole child inside the MOVE compound to survive. (Ramona Africa, still active with MOVE, is the only adult to have escaped from the burning house.)

There is video shot by the police. There were student films about MOVE, public affairs broadcasts, other archival material. Deftly editing the components together, and only sparingly deploying intertitle cards for clarity, Let the Fire Burn brings this almost 28-year-old tragedy to life again - vividly, viscerally.

Osder likens his tack to that of a museum curator: "We're just trying to put one artifact next to another artifact next to another artifact. And as you put them together, the story emerges."

As such, Let the Fire Burn is part of a nascent movement in documentary films that has been dubbed "historical verite."

Osder isn't wild about that tag.

"What I have been saying is that we're dealing with the past in present tense," he explains. "A movie about the past, but one that plays in present tense."

And Genna Terranova, director of programming at the Tribeca Film Festival, was excited by Osder's all-pastiche approach.

"The way Jason handled the found footage and reconstructed the story was incredible," she says. "It's a witnessing, in a way. Not an omniscient witnessing, but a little bit of one . . . . You can see that he is looking for understanding."

Terranova, who selected Let the Fire Burn for the World Documentary Competition section of the fest, was unfamiliar with the events that led to dropping C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex TR-2 on a West Philadelphia rowhouse occupied by men, women, and children.

"We felt like this is a story that was so incredibly powerful and important - an important part of our history, American history - that we felt it needed a wider audience," she says. "And we wanted to be the vehicle to do that."

For the prizewinning author John Edgar Wideman, the MOVE bombing remains "a crucially important event - it was frightening, it was shocking," he says. And it prompted Wideman, who lived in Philadelphia in the 1960s, attending the University of Pennsylvania, and who later knew many of the MOVE members, to write a novel that examined his concerns. Philadelphia Fire was published in 1990.

Reached at his office at Brown University, where he is teaching in the creative writing program, Wideman says he has been aware of Osder's film, but hasn't yet seen Let the Fire Burn. But he suggests that any documentary to investigate the tumult of that time is worthy of attention.

"It looked to me, on the TV screen, like events that were going on in other places in the world . . . . Other places burning. Other countries," he says. "And then I'm thinking, 'But jeez, this is my place, this is Philadelphia, this is America.' "

And there were children involved.

"They were the ones who burned up like potato chips," he continues. "And usually, as a country, as a people, we get upset about children who get in the line of fire."

Sam Katz, the three-time Philadelphia mayoral candidate-turned-filmmaker, has been documenting the city's history in a series of his own films, Philadelphia: The Great Experiment. He is at work now on the segment that covers the 1970s and the 1980s. The decadelong confrontations between the city and MOVE are a big part of that chapter.

"There was a lot going on in this period, but it's hard to get away from MOVE as the defining moment," he says.

Katz was shown a work-in-progress cut of Let the Fire Burn last year, and was impressed. "It's a film that needed to be made," he says.

Clearly, that was Osder's feeling, too. When he was studying film at the University of Florida at the turn of the millennium, he couldn't believe his fellow students hadn't heard of MOVE, of the city that bombed itself.

"Here's this thing that had this profound impression on me, and when I would bring it up in conversation no one knew what I was talking about," he recalls. "People my own age, from different parts of the country, had not heard about it."

Let the Fire Burn does not yet have a distributor, but it's already been selected to screen at the San Francisco International Film Festival and Hot Docs, the Toronto-based nonfiction film fest. And distributor or no, Osder plans to hold screenings in his hometown.

"I want to bring it back to the city," he says. "Not so people will yell and scream, but so people actually will talk and think about it."

And ask the question: How does the unthinkable happen?

"You say to people that the police dropped a bomb and let the fire burn and three blocks burned down and kids died," Osder says. "I think the film gives at least a partial answer to the question of 'how?', which is as soon as people stop looking at fellow human beings as fellow human beings, as equals, as soon as they see something else there - and it could be black, white, gay, it could be Muslim, and in this case it was MOVE - well, then the door opens wide to all kinds of crazy violence."