The film is stark, raw, profane, and angry. It is also a snapshot of a flash point in one community and documentation of a tragedy that sparked a protest movement.

When unarmed teenager Michael Brown, Jr. was shot and killed by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, the St. Louis suburb erupted in anger, first at police, then at the media, and then at the city and state that responded to the growing protests with a smothering show of military force.

Whose Streets, a documentary from first time filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, will be screened at the Chilmark Community Center on August 9, as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival’s summer series.

A discussion with Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, and Janaya Khan, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada, will follow the screening.

Whose Streets hammers home the blunt contrast of Ferguson in the hours and days and months after the shooting, between what the nation saw through news reports, and what the residents saw from the vantage point of their own streets, and in some cases, their own front yards.

With extensive use of mobile phone camera footage and contemporaneous social media posts, the film offers a look inside the building of a movement by young leaders unwilling to accept protest tactics of the past. In one moving scene, an auditorium full of people shouted down an official of the NAACP, demanding that a young protest leader be allowed to speak.

“I don’t care about nobody opinion about what we doing,” the protest leader said. “I don’t care how it look. It ain’t made for TV. This ain’t your daddy’s civil rights movement.”

Ms. Khan-Cullors said she was excited to travel to Martha’s Vineyard to discuss the documentary next week.

“It is a powerful film,” Ms. Khan-Cullors said, speaking by phone from her Los Angeles area home. “It was one of the first times in our movement that we’re hearing from people of Ferguson, of St. Louis, about their experience about what they have been through, about the future. It was clearly made for people to have a moment to peer into the impact that building a movement has on the people who are building it.”

The movement she founded together with community activists Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi played a role and gained prominence during the Ferguson protests.

Black Lives Matter, however, was founded a year earlier in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who was charged with the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin while patrolling on a community security watch in Sanford, Fla. She said she foresaw the organization becoming an international movement before the Ferguson protests.

“We saw it as a political project,” Ms. Khan-Cullors said. “The three of us are trained organizers. It wasn’t just something we put on social media. We wanted to infiltrate, we wanted to have Black Lives Matter be integrated into every household. It’s a powerful moment. I literally wrote a post a couple days after we created Black Lives Matter ‘I hope it gets bigger than we can ever imagine.’”

She continued: “There was such a low level conversation happening on mainstream media about the lives of black people. It isn’t really until Trayvon Martin, and our ability to use Facebook and Twitter, to have a larger conversation about what’s happening to black people, we got to reclaim our own voices through these online spaces.”

Ms. Khan-Cullors said she sees progress in the national conversation about police and the communities they work in.

“We have shifted the broader narrative that police are just the good guys,” she said. “We’ve allowed for a much larger conversation about how law enforcement in particular has some of the biggest budgets in comparison to our budgets around education and housing. We have exposed that the U.S. at large has completely invested in policing and imprisonment. I think we’ve allowed for a new conversation about how we can reimagine public safety.”

But Ms. Khan-Cullors also sees a retreat in civil rights, and she places responsibility for that squarely at the doorstep of the White House.

“Clearly with the election of 45 [referring to 45th president Donald Trump] and this new government we’re seeing white supremacists and conservatives be emboldened to believe that their hate should be accepted in this country. Much of his administration has rolled back the civil rights of folk that are marginalized across race, across gender. As we’ve seen with the Affordable Care Act, as we’ve seen with the transgender military ban, as we’ve seen with the Muslim ban, this administration has literally tried to drag us back into the Jim Crow era.”

Still, she said she is hopeful about the future when viewed in the context of a relatively young nation.

“I’m optimistic. I think we’re in a very hard moment, but this is just a blip in history,” Ms. Khan-Cullors said. “We have a lot to offer, especially black folks, especially what we’ve been through. We are constantly trying to change the very fabric of America. I have a lot of hope for what’s possible.”

Whose Streets screens on Wednesday, August 9 at 8 p.m. at the Chilmark Community Center. Visit tmvff.org for tickets.