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Upon completing duties as a debut screenwriter, Friedrich Dürrenmatt celebrated a job well done by promptly rewriting the whole thing. The Swiss playwright and novelist had bent to studio demands and relinquished control of his script, It Happened in Broad Daylight, to Hans Jacoby, a veteran Hollywood writer who knew what studios wanted and gave it to them. Dürrenmatt collaborated with Jacoby and turned in a by-the-numbers detective story where clues lead to the perp and justice was served. But he didn’t believe in it. He had come from the traditions of Brecht’s epic theater and German philosophy, neither of which promise happy endings. So he rewrote his screenplay into a short novel, The Pledge, the new opening of which introduces a crime writer who’s instantly berated for his predictable, unrealistic garbage. Now the characters reenact It Happened in Broad Daylight‘s story only to discover even...

Various sets of cameras, far different from the national-news ones obsessed only with Black homicide rates, have been rolling in Chicago over the last few years. Prominent efforts include “16 Shots” (2019), about the police murder of Laquan McDonald, and the NatGeo documentary miniseries “City So Real” (2020), which exposed the widespread opposition to Mayor Rahm Emanuel that contrasted with his esteemed national image. These, however, are far from the only attempts to put a present-day spotlight on the race and class issues still at play in the inner workings of one of the nation’s most iconic and notorious cities.

Just as “Unapologetic” (2020) put a lens on the rarely covered Movement for Black Lives in Chicago, protesting institutional complicity in racialized state violence with a focus on two female queer activists at the forefront, Chicago native Kevin Shaw’s “Let the Little Light Shine” amplifies another footnoted protest in the city.

Shaw...