People were saying, 'This boy got shot in Fruitvale.' And then the next day, it was all over the news. “I happened to be home when Oscar was shot, and I found out about it through word of mouth first because they shut down the BART station. “I discovered the story the same way as everybody else in the Bay Area,” says Coogler, then an Oakland native and the same age as Grant. Controversy and public outrage ensued – including protests and rioting – over police brutality in the region. Witness reports and cell phone video of the incident suggested that, even if Grant’s death was accidental, the officers’ response had been out of proportion to the circumstances.

Written and directed by first-time helmer Ryan Coogler, “ Fruitvale Station” dramatizes the real-life 2009 story of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African American resident of Oakland, California, a parolee released after a pair of brief stints in state prison for assorted felonies.Īfter celebrating New Year’s Eve with friends and the mother of his child, Grant was returning home on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train where a fight broke out, and as a result Grant was detained at Fruitvale Station by BART officers and in a subsequent altercation, an officer intending to taser Grant fatally shot and killed him. The indie drama “Fruitvale Station” isn’t about a cause, a movement, a policy or an agenda, but it is about change, both for those who see it and for those who made the film.

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