Emmett Till is fourteen years old in the summer of 1955, a Chicago kid visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when an encounter with a white woman in a store ends with him beaten, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. The film builds its account from archival photographs, news footage, and interviews, including testimony described as never seen before, tracing the story from Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, through his Southern cousins who were with him that night, to filmed recollections from his uncle, Moses Wright, who stood up in a segregated courtroom and pointed out the two men accused of killing him. News footage captures Till-Mobley addressing the country directly, insisting her son's death not go unanswered, a decision that helped turn a local killing into a national reckoning. The interviews carry an unpolished, plainly lit 1950s quality that the film does not smooth over, letting the discomfort of the era's cameras sit alongside the discomfort of what the townspeople around the trial were willing to shrug off.