Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr called it "one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the 20th century".
He was talking about the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 – for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
The film Till tells that heartbreaking story through the eyes of Emmett's mother Mamie Till-Mobley, who herself died in 2003 after a long fight against racial injustice.
It's a heart-wrenching story, but according to the movie's director, Chinonye Chukwu, this isn't a film people should avoid or look away from.
"Don't assume the film that you're going to see," Chukwu said.
"This film and this story of Mamie and Emmett's legacy is so much more than the physical violence done to him.
"And it does a disservice to their stories and to their humanity to think that this film can only be told in a way that embraces that trauma."
Mamie was a widowed single mother working for the Air Force in Chicago when her son was murdered while he was away visiting family in America's deep south.
Mamie insisted that her son's brutally maimed body be viewed in an open casket at his funeral and gave permission for Jet Magazine – which has historically covered news, politics, sport, entertainment and social issues affecting black America – to publish the unaltered graphic images of her son's remains.
It was an act of defiance and activism that became a lightning rod for the civil rights movement in the United States.
"Without Mamie, we wouldn't know who Emmett Till was," Chukwu said.
"She is the heartbeat of this entire story. She is the catalyst.
"There is no story without Mamie."
The investigation into Emmett Till's murder ended in 2021, with the US government saying it failed to prove the white woman at the centre of the case had lied when she testified at the 1955 trial that the 14-year-old boy had made sexual advances towards her.
Danielle Deadwyler plays Mamie in a captivating performance in Till.
During the movie, Mamie gives a speech in which she admits she hadn't paid too much attention to the struggles faced by others in her community, until the death of her son brought the realities of racial injustice home.
She says this leads her to take the stance:
"What happens to any of us anywhere in the world had better be the business of us all."
"Mamie didn't start out with that kind of consciousness and thinking in the beginning," Chukwu said.
"She was very much in her own middle-class Chicago bubble.
"And that's not how change happens."
The film also stars Whoopi Goldberg, who was involved in a decades-long journey to get the film made.
Chukwu said while the events in the movie happened some time ago, it's a story that remains relevant today.
"This is a story that is very much reflective of our present reality," she said.
"This is not a story that just existed in the past. This is not a story that only affects Americans or black Americans or black people.
"And we cannot ignore it. We cannot ignore these systems of oppression that continue to be replicated and pervade every aspect of our world to this day.
"There is an active erasure of this information, of these people's lives, of this history in textbooks.
"No one really knows the story about Mamie Till-Mobley.
"And I really wanted to centre this incredible black woman in her rightful place in history."
Till opens in cinemas on March 9.
