"Experts don't really have a consensus on the definition of lynching, but generally it's agreed that a lynching occurs when three or more people gather for a public, racialized murder," filmmaker Jacqueline Olive told WNYC's cultural critic Rebecca Carroll, on the subject of her new documentary film, "Always in Season." The film, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and earned a special jury prize, uses the case of a black teenage boy found hanging from a swing set in North Carolina as the catalyst to explore the layered history of lynching in America. 

Olive spent 10 years working on the film in various different cities and towns throughout the country, including the Bay Area, which is where she was when Oscar Grant was shot and killed by police at the Fruitvale train station in Oakland. The fatal shooing of Grant, a black 22-year old father of a then-young daughter, loomed large in Olive's mind, and prompted her to delve into the legacy of lynching black bodies, and how it manifests in contemporary terms. She noted that the advent of social media and the viralilty of videos capturing police brutality and violence against black men is an extended form of lynching that we can learn from. 

"The videos are really important," she said. "It was really important that they become viral so that people understand what's going on. When I began filming in 2010, very few people wanted to talk about lynching, even black people. Particularly young people really felt like it was something that was relegated to the past." 

Olive said, though, that despite the viral video footage, very little has been done to hold the police and perpetrators of modern lynchings accountable. She hopes her film will raise awareness and encourage people to consider ways they can act. "There are things we can do in our communities to help those who have been harmed and to strengthen our community so that we can  move toward healing. We have the power to do it." 

"Always in Season" had its premiere at the Metrograph in New York and runs through October 3.