The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Director David France digs into the life and unexplained death of Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans activist and one of the loudest voices at Stonewall.

Johnson called herself a "street queen" of Greenwich Village and, with Sylvia Rivera, started S.T.A.R., a group fighting for homeless trans youth. In the summer of 1992 her body turned up in the Hudson River. The NYPD ruled it a suicide; the people who knew her never bought it. France frames the film as a cold-case investigation, following activist Victoria Cruz as she reopens files, tracks down witnesses, and chases leads decades after the fact.

Coming from the director of the AIDS-crisis chronicle How to Survive a Plague, the film weaves seventies archive footage into a present-day inquiry until a portrait of an entire movement emerges behind one case. It's for viewers who want the real history of LGBT activism and the hard questions that were never answered. Stream The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017) online on iFILM.