Winner of top prizes at at the BlackStar and New Orleans Film Festivals, Test Pattern chronicles a young Black woman’s attempts to get help from an uncaring system after an assault. An interracial couple’s supportive relationship is put to the test after the woman (Brittany S. Hall, HBO’s Ballers) is sexually assaulted and her boyfriend (Will Brill, The OA, Not Fade Away) must drive her from hospital to hospital around Austin in search of a rape kit. In many ways the ideal modern couple—infinitely patient, supportive of one another’s dreams, just dissimilar enough in just the right ways—their bond is torture-tested as they see their private lives refracted through the clumsy medical and legal institutions that surround, interpret, and adjudicate cases like Renesha’s.

In her gripping and powerful feature debut, Shatara Michelle Ford makes precise yet lyrical use of flashbacks and silence to draw a spacious portrait of an intimate crisis. Set against the backdrop of our national discussions about an inequitable health system, #MeToo and race relations, Test Pattern is a unique exploration of institutional racism and sexism from a Black female point of view.

Rolling Stone raves, "You can feel it as you watch it. Here is a born filmmaker, fighting to get her vision in front of an audience—and what a vision this is. We owe it to that effort to watch this movie. More than that, we owe it to ourselves."