The Holly

Terrance Roberts, an anti-gang activist whose work gained him national recognition, is facing life in prison. In an incident that shocked the city of Denver, Roberts shot someone at his own peace rally. The shooting happened in the so-called “Holly,” a neighborhood that was once the center of Denver’s civil rights movement—and later was Roberts’s turf back when he too was a gang member.

Journalist Julian Rubinstein, who grew up in Denver and moved back to work on this project, begins looking into the case, and finds that public reporting doesn’t match what he is hearing: that Roberts was targeted by law enforcement because of his activism. Rubinstein decides to go deep, spending seven years in the neighborhood and finding that the shooting case is a window into a shadowy world where much of the city’s violence take place, and a neighborhood which is undergoing a rapid gentrification.

Rubinstein's award-winning book on the same subject, also called The Holly, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2021. The documentary is a true crime mystery featuring active gang members, activists, cops, politicians, developers and Roberts’s family, including his father, a preacher who works most of the city's gang homicides. Terrance Roberts, the main character, is a complicated figure whose life symbolizes the struggles of activists and the challenges of trying to escape one’s past. The film climaxes with Roberts’s trial, as he faces life in prison in a case that exposes hidden impacts of structural racism and gentrification, and the unreported ways that law enforcement goes about fighting gang violence, which claims more lives every year in America than any other form of violent crime.