A husband and wife production team, Davis and Heilbroner have focused on criminal justice issues in many of their projects, including the Peabody award-winning film The Newburgh Sting. Heilbroner himself is a former New York City prosecutor and said that background probably helped them in getting access to the officials who spoke with them in the film.

Davis said she hoped that the film will be “a catalyst for discussion and maybe incentivize [law enforcement] into treating people more as human beings and not as a chance for you to flex one’s power muscles.”

As for Bland’s family, they want the film to push people to continue to “say her name” and organize around issues of police brutality and injustice, especially now that national attention has been diffused into so many other directions.

“The shift in the news cycle and the turn to the divisive rhetoric that’s going on in this country, I think, without a shadow of a doubt, is amplifying the problem in the sense that no one’s talking about it, said Cooper. “It’s almost become the expectation and that’s really hurtful.”

Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland premieres on HBO on 3 December with a UK date yet to be announced