At a time when news of each new mass shooting vanish es all too quickly from headlines, “Emanuel” offers a memorial. The documentary revisits the June 2015 killings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., by interviewing relatives of the victims, survivors of the shooting, journalists and public officials about their experiences of the crime or of first hearing about the death s .

The director Brian Ivie weaves in a bit of the history about Charleston, a hub of the slave trade, and about churchgoing as a symbol of independence for African-Americans after the Civil War.