Members of the Reels family in Silver Dollar Road (Wayne Lawrence/Amazon Studios)

Raoul Peck, known for provocative documentaries such as Exterminate All the Brutes and I Am Not Your Negro, takes a more unadorned, straightforward approach with Silver Dollar Road that is nonetheless effective and stirring.

Based upon reportage by Lizzie Presser from ProPublica, co-published with The New Yorker, this film peers into the predicament of the Reels, a Black family who wants to reclaim their long-owned, roughly 13-and-a-half-acre waterfront property in rural, coastal North Carolina, which is threatened by developers. In the 1970s, Mitchell Reels, a family patriarch, did not provide a will for his land—common at the time for Black landowners who did not have any access to legal systems. In the wake of his death, a distant relative was able to declare proprietorship of the land through a contractual loophole and sell it to developers, unbeknownst to the rest of the family. Now one of the houses along Silver Dollar Road is empty and the land overgrown as legal battles persist. Through the years, the family has fought for their ancestor’s land, with continued resistance from courts and inherently racist real estate laws.

The minute, sometimes perplexing legal details of the case can be difficult to grasp. (The filmmakers use painterly graphics of family trees and maps as a guide). The emphasis is more upon the family members and the immense overriding injustice of the situation. As they describe how they have been victimized by devious advisers and lawyers, Silver Dollar Road becomes a microcosm of the paucity of and the threats to Black-owned property. The developers, Adams Creek Associates, want to build houses and a golf course over the land, thereby hiking up property values and taxes along the road and pushing neighbors out. The prolonged fight is about making money, of course, but also, insidiously, about taking away power, ownership, and a place of home and community from Blacks.

The film is probing, elegantly and reverentially filmed, highlighting the green, insect-humming sensuousness of the land, with the backing of a pleasing score by Alexei Aigui. However, one of the documentary’s most gripping moments comes from found footage. Through a shaky 2011 cell phone recordings, one family member, Mamie, films White developers encroaching upon their land, cops patrolling the area, and workers cutting power lines. They are potent scenes that sticks out visually and emotionally. Mamie’s brothers Melvin, a fisherman along the Silver Dollar Road waters, and Licurtis are eventually arrested for civil contempt for refusing to leave the land, and they serve extreme eight-year sentences. The film does not skirt over the unbearable toll—the weight of time and living lost in these men’s lives. It is an emotional gut-punch to hear Licurtis’s testimony.

Peck weaves in some sobering, startling statistics—Blacks have lost more than 90 percent of U.S. farmland over the past 100 years—but mostly we see the specific snapshots of joy and pain this beautiful, lost, and threatened land has brought to this family through the years that rightfully belongs to them. An extremely moving original song, “Wounded Heart,” by Kenyan-born artist Ondara, plays over the elegiac closer that features joyful, smiling images and photographs of the family’s past.