About nine hours before I saw “After Parkland,” a student in Santa Clarita, Calif., opened fire at his high school, killing two of his classmates. It was impossible to watch the movie without thinking about those events — or about how a similar documentary might eventually be made there.

Emily Taguchi and Jake Lefferman’s anguished film observes the lingering impact of the February 2018 killings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. The student activist David Hogg, a featured subject, likens going back to school to surviving a plane crash, then boarding that same plane every day with the underlying issue unresolved.

Taguchi and Lefferman, who filmed from that February through the start of the next school year, are generally more interested in people than policy. Manuel Oliver, whose son, Joaquin, was killed, channels his grief into his work as a basketball coach (a sport his son played) and making art. (After arriving in Chicago to create a mural, Oliver tries to buy an item more innocuous than a gun, spray paint — and learns that its sale is banned in the city.)