The Hard Stop (15, 85 mins)
★★★
On August 4, 2011, Mark Duggan was shot dead by police on the streets of London. The Met say he was armed at the time; his family and friends insist he wasn’t. The killing sparked off riots across the capital and the rest of the country that left a further five people dead.
George Amponsah’s The Hard Stop surveys all of this damage through the eyes of two of Duggan’s best friends, Marcus Knox-Hooke and Kurtis Henville, in the build-up to the inquest that passed judgment on whether Duggan was unlawfully killed. When we join them, Knox-Hooke is about to go to jail for his part in sparking the initial riot in Tottenham and Henville is job-hunting after recently being released from prison after a spell inside for drug trafficking.
