The Black Panther Party's rise and fall runs through government documents, archival news footage, and interviews with the people who lived the conflict from both sides: former Panther activists alongside retired FBI and CIA officers. The film traces the party's platform on race and poverty, its free breakfast programs and community patrols, against the counterintelligence campaigns aimed at breaking it apart, laying out the surveillance, infiltration, and violence that followed the Panthers through the 1960s and 70s. Ex-officials describe their own roles in the operations on camera, a rare instance of the people who ran the programs explaining them directly rather than through later reporting. The film treats the party's public image, built on guns, berets, and confrontation, as only part of the story, and spends equal time on the organizing work that image obscured. What emerges is less a simple hero-or-villain account than a record of a government treating a domestic political movement as a security threat, with the era's own footage and paperwork as the evidence.