Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Turfseer 'The Interrupters' is an excellent documentary about a group called CeaseFire, which primarily employs streetwise, ex-cons as 'Violence Interrupters' on the tough streets of inner city Chicago. The 'Interrupters' are reformed criminals who know the lingo of the street and go around trying to defuse potential confrontations from occurring, cooling down members of their community, who often become enraged due to minor sleights which are misinterpreted as major signs of disrespect.The group is led by Tio Hardiman, an ex-petty street criminal who later earned a Master's Degree and now heads a "Mission Impossible" team who are 'on call' to nip any potential violent incident in the bud. Remarkably, during a staff meeting shown at the beginning of the documentary, a fight develops right outside where the Interrupters are discussing strategy, and they rush out to quell the violence which involves one youth threatening another with a knife.'The Interrupters' focuses on the lives of three members: Ameena Matthews, an ex-Gang enforcer, now a spiritual Muslim, who has communication skills as good as any highly-trained social worker; Cobe Williams, who served 12 years for Drug Trafficking and Attempted Murder, now a gentle family man, and Eddie Bocanegra, who was incarcerated 14 years for murder, now a talented artist.We follow these 'Interrupters' as they work on various 'assignments', troubled individuals (a good number of them young people), who are prone to acting out behavior. Matthews acts as a grief counselor for a family whose son was murdered, a case which was widely publicized on Youtube and received national attention. She speaks at the funeral and we see the devastating effect the murder had on the victim's family members. Matthews also counsels a teenager named Caprysha, who ends up back at a youth facility at film's end. She concedes that not all their interventions will be successful. In the case of Caprysha, she appears to vacillate between good conduct and bad (although I read on google that she eventually earned her high school diploma).Cobe Williams works with two brothers who can't seem to stop fighting with one another and later gets good results with a neighborhood hothead, 'Flamo', who wants to take revenge on some thugs who beat up one of his relatives. Williams manages to calm him down and in the last segment, we see 'Flamo' has obtained a job as a security guard and is wearing the uniform, ready to head off for work.Eddie Bocanegra not only teaches art to elementary school students but also works with a young parolee, who was sent away three years for armed robbery. There's an emotional scene where he returns to the scene of his crime, a beauty salon, and apologizes to the victims. One victim accepts his apology but still makes it clear that his actions had a devastating effect on her life. The young man eventually obtains a job as a gardener at a school and is proud that he has put his violent past behind him. Eddie would like to apologize to the family of the victim he murdered, but indicates the family is perhaps not ready to forgive him.While 'The Interrupters' do valiant work, one wonders how effective they are at what they're doing. One Interrupter concedes that their work is only a 'band aid' and the violence simply continues unabated, all over this country. The Interrupters admit that you can't work with someone who ultimately doesn't want to change.Steve James, known for the award-winning documentary 'Hoop Dreams', has done an excellent job showcasing the noble aims of this group. Sometimes I felt that 'The Interrupters' could have been a tad bit shorter, especially toward the end. But all in all, it's a fascinating look at how one group attempts to deal with the plague of violence, in their own community.

proterozoic Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland, Detroit – synonyms for American crime, places where young men kill one another in the streets. Bleak background noise in the national news, with dim flares of outrage at especially gruesome killings.On the subject of solutions, our imaginations are dismally poor and usually limited to applying money or violence in some form. More police, more arrests, longer sentences, talk of the National Guard on the streets.The Interrupters seem to have a better gimmick. The violence prevention group CeaseFire recruited a group of tattooed ex-gang-members in Chicago, most of whom turned away from crime after cooling off in hospitals or prisons. They know the locals, and they have credibility where cops, teachers and politicians don't.The film follows several of them: a tough gang heiress turned devout Muslim, an imposing man with several prison terms for drugs and violence, and a soft-spoken Latino out after serving 14 years for murder. Interrupters are, in effect, roaming street counselors; unlike the armchair type, they usually find themselves between two or more people who are about to begin stabbing one another. They are to ordinary counselors what BASE jumpers are to people who feel proud of taking stairs.The rare and valuable insight of the film is how, over the course of a year, the counselors manage to talk down people who're about to do horrible things, and how these people arrive at such a place to begin with. None of them are remorseless sociopaths, and none of them appear to want or relish violence. They want the best for themselves, they value their families, and yet some have come to the verge of actual fratricide. Why? Hopelessness, poor impulse control, lack of role models, a gang tribalism that feeds on vacuum and anarchy.It's amazing how many fights and murders aren't motivated by gain. They're essentially the result of undereducated boys applying the Cheney Doctrine every day on street level – "get them before they get you." On these streets, nobody trusts each other, everybody is armed and nobody is willing to back down from a fight. Tempers can flare instantly, and the killers are often as baffled by their own crimes as anybody else.Somehow, the Interrupters pull young people out of this mindset. It takes a heroic amount of trust and patience. It doesn't work all the time. But it works way more often than one imagines it should.There is a large and influential contingent in our country which holds that the only solution to inner-city violence is to tighten the screws even further. To their Klingon eyes, the CeaseFire approach probably looks like so much liberal mollycoddling of people who just ought to have their heads busted on the pavement more often. One of the thicker ironies of "The Interrupters" is that this Old Testament law enforcement mentality comes from precisely the same place as the bloody retaliations and preemptive violence by South Side gang-bangers.I listened to the young ruffians, and heard the words of steely-eyed Giulianis: not backing down, not showing weakness, getting tough, getting serious, showing them who's boss. Once you realize that "tough on crime" politicians count on the same tactics to intimidate gangs that gangs use to intimidate one another, you may recognize the same lustful rage in yourself as well, and subside to embarrassed head-scratching.The Interrupters talk about the legal trickery of being involved in potential crimes, and sometimes the organization has no choice but to get law enforcement on the case. However, their strength is not in meting out punishment, but understanding – and it's astonishing to see violent young toughs respond and open up. Even with all the money, cops and technology that America can scratch together, maybe the best way to solve social problems is still through one person talking to another.

Richard Brooks This is a moving and challenging, if rather long, documentary that follows the progress of the interrupters over the course of a year. However, it does not feel too long and the 125min passes surprisingly quickly.The disturbing gang violence and cycle of revenge in Chicago is sensitively rendered; there is no gratuitous detail. The interrupters are trying to intervene, to interrupt the cycle of shootings.But there is hope. Hope in that the interrupters are themselves former gang members who are now working to reduce the violence; and hope in that they build relationships with others, and in their perseverance not only is the cycle of violence interrupted, but the lives of the individuals are changed for the better.Sensitively made, gives a real insight into the situation in Chicago; and offers real hope that a leopard can indeed change its spots.Highly recommended.

chaz-28 The Interrupters is frustrating. The three 'violence interrupters' which this film follows must have an endless supply of optimism and an iron will to go out there every day and try and convince people, who mostly are not looking to be convinced, that there are better choices than resorting to violence and revenge. A normal person would give up, probably on the first day, but not the CeaseFire interrupters. Most of CeaseFire's violence interrupters are ex-cons. This is actually a plus on their job application for a position like this. They know firsthand the consequences and utter futility which comes with choosing the violent option in an argument on the street. Their goal is to intervene in an argument's 'front end' before pistols are drawn from waistbands. Chicago has drawn national attention for the number of murders which happen on its streets every year, especially involving adolescents. The Interrupters follows a year in the life not just of the CeaseFire organization, but specifically three of their most committed mediators. The most engaging and interesting person by far is Ameena Matthews. She is the daughter of Jeff Fort, one of Chicago's most notorious gangsters, who made mistakes in her youth but is now out in force and ready to get in your face to show you just how wrong a choice violence is. With no fear, Ameena will walk in the middle of a large group of young gangbangers and give them a lecture on just where they are headed. Amazingly, these lectures usually work. You do not want to disappoint Ameena Matthews; she is one of the most persuasive and enigmatic people ever to show up in a documentary.Her fellow mediators are not as engaging as she is though. Cobe Williams is usually an interesting guy to follow, especially when he is trying to calm down a man known as 'Flamo'. Flamo has a particularly bad day when he first meet him and appears to be 100% ready to charge down the block and start a shooting spree. Cobe listens, nods his head, and then offers to take Flamo out to dinner thereby putting some distance and time between him and his problems. We check in with Flamo every now and then and he provides some segments of comic relief and even some hope. The third mediator is Eddie Bocanegra. He comes in a distant third on this list of three. Most of the time, he is with the family of a deceased young man who made some poor choices and ended up in a coffin. Eddie strikes up a relationship with the boy's sister and encourages her to draw to deal with her grief. The rest of the time, Eddie leads an art class in a local elementary school to teach the kids who are just a few years away from their prime ages of vulnerability to think through their choices to their logical conclusions. Eddie is never shown actually talking down violent situations like Ameena and Cobe are. He acts as more of a peripheral mediator rather than a down in the mud violence buffer, at least that is how the editing process shows him. The filmmaker, Steve James (Hoop Dreams), checks in with various at risk youth throughout the year. Some start off in very shaky and turbulent places but steadily pull themselves up and out of the gutter. Others, however, leave you shaking your head at the end acknowledging that there will most likely be many more failures for the mediators than successes. Happy endings really do seem few and far between in the streets of Chicago, even when there are extremely persuasive interrupters who guarantee that if you pull the trigger, you will not win in the end.