“She does not understand she has said such amazing things… to a man with a gun.”

Police Beat (2005) was directed by Robinson Devor, a Seattle-based film maker also noted for the 2007 film Zoo, a documentary which attempts to objectively portray the side of a “lifestyle” group in the Seattle area interested in zoophilia.

This film is quite different. In 2005 it won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at Sundance, the Gotham Award nomination for “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You,” as well personal gains in the form of Independent Spirit awards for Robinson Devour as “Someone to Watch” and a producers award for Alexis Ferris.

Police Beat was written by both the director, Devor, and Charles Mudede, a Rhodesian immigrant who writes for a Seattle weekly free publication called The Stranger. I grew up reading The Stranger, and it’s various serious and humorous columns: many are now familiar with nationally syndicated sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, but there was also “I, Anonymous,” where readers could send in anonymous rants about their infuriating roommate, neighbor, ex-boyfriend, cat, barrista, lady on the bus, or whatever happened to be bothering them. There was also “Police Beat,” a collection of the more off-beat incidents from Seattle Police Department reports in the preceding week. This is the column where Mudede made his mark, and it is clearly the inspiration of the film.

In Police Beat we follow “Z,” a Senegalese immigrant and, “rather bewilderingly” (NYT), a recent hire to Seattle’s fleet of bicycle police. Z spends the whole film worrying about his absent girlfriend, a local girl who has gone on a camping trip with her male roommate. Through responding to a series of incidents across Seattle (all based on real police reports and Police Beat articles), we explore not only the character Z, but of the city of Seattle and life there through his eyes. Z is confounded by the people and actions around him, unsure of how things work in this town, but ever sure of himself. We see Z write out the kind of reports often featured in Mudede’s column, referencing a huge overhanging chart of police codes (reminiscent of a table of elements, like all of life’s incidents result from A plus B, divided by Q equals X), and hear him make the same kind of emotional, philosophical and ethnographic observations Mudede still provides weekly as commentary in The Stranger. The film is an elegant translation of Mudede’s local color poetry to the big screen.

The film is part regional portraiture, but also a philosophical exploration accessible to anyone and a character study of a highly unique individual and circumstance. The film was produced through Northwest Film Forum, an organization founded in 1995 to cultivate and fund regional cinema in the Pacific Northwest. The cinematography by Sean Kirby is a highlight for me. The film is visually luscious, using 35mm scope in more than a hundred locations to create painterly visions of my hometown, surreally capturing Seattle in colors that are rarely so tangible in a city famous for overcast weather.