Pierre and Claudia Lacy in Always in Season (Phil Fonville/Multitude Films)

Oftentimes, it’s easy to think of Jim Crow–era racial violence as something in the far gone past. In her riveting and disturbing documentary, filmmaker Jacqueline Olive reminds us why it is dangerous to presume so. Part investigative documentary, part historical examination, the film centers on the death of a 17-year old African American Lennon Lacy, who was found dead hanging from a swing set in 2014 in Bladenboro, North Carolina. The death was ruled a suicide by local police, but various details preceding Lennon’s death, as well as the inclement racial history of lynching in the South, provide many reasons to be suspicious of the ruling.

The relentless pursuit of justice by Lennon’s mother, Claudia, for her son’s death leads viewers on a journey through the cultural and social backdrop of Bladenboro, an idyllically rural Southern town. We also follow an arts group that performs annual reenactments of the infamous Moore’s Ford lynchings of 1946, in which four African Americans were beaten, shot, and lynched by a white mob on Moore’s Ford Bridge in Georgia. The film also utilizes voice-over narration, chillingly performed by actor and activist Danny Glover reading excerpts of old newspapers advertising local lynchings.

Olive gives her audience a clear picture of the character of the town. We hear the voices of Lennon’s older brother, Pierre; his friends; his girlfriend; lawyers involved in the case; and the local church community, which helped Claudia to organize a town-wide march. Most tellingly, we also witness a few dissenting opinions from the town’s white residents, including the editor of the local paper, whose disinterest in the affair is both unsurprising and symbolic of one side of the American discourse on race. In one particularly subtle sequence, older white residents cast a cold gaze as Claudia and her fellow protestors march by.

Always in Season is incredibly powerful, and you’ll likely be speechless after it’s over. Olive’s film isn’t just a call to justice for Lennon and other unsolved murders of African Americans but a cautionary tale of what happens when we forget our history and neglect the violent underbellies of institutional racism that is still far from over.