Give Us This Day

East St Louis is a post industrial city across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, MO, with deep racial divides and the highest homicide rate per capita in the U.S. Give Us This Day is an unflinching look into the lives of three members of the local police and three city residents as each attempts to both survive and improve their own lives, as well as that of their city. Shot over the course of one year, the cinema verite approach exposes a city with too many guns, too little education, excessive poverty, and a long history of racial tension. With no agenda to find easy explanations for complex problems, the film unsparingly documents the day-to-day realities of life in a broken urban system and attempts to cast some rays of hope and understanding on one of the biggest and seemingly least solvable problems in modern day America. (Woodstock Film Festival)