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# A Tribute to Latasha Harlins From Those Who Knew Her Best
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/latasha-harlins-netflix-documentary/
- Published: 2020-09-25T12:30:41.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T15:42:46.000Z
- Description: A Love Song for Latasha is a "spiritual archive" of who Harlins was in life, rather than focusing on the circumstances of her death.
- Author: Dan Schindel
- Tags: Film, Capsule Reviews, Documentary, Los Angeles, Netflix, Review, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 09:08 (2019, 2020, part 3)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/latasha-scaled-e1600957463290.jpg)

The 1991 [murder of Latasha Harlins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing%5Fof%5FLatasha%5FHarlins?ref=hyperallergic.com) was one of the inciting incidents for the following year’s mass uprising in Los Angeles. But the new short documentary *A Love Song for Latasha* does not wish to dwell on the circumstances of her death. Director Sophia Nahli Allison believes that in the decades since, Harlins as a human being has been obscured. She wants to recapture who this Black teen was in life, so that she can be more than a symbol of racial injustice.

To that end, Allison interviews two women who knew Latasha well: her best friend Ty and her cousin Shinese. Described as a “spiritual archive,” the film is a memory play, bringing their reminiscences about Latasha to life with magic-realist-infused reenactments and expressive sequences. Though brief, it is suffused with tremendous melancholy. Not just a tribute to a single person, *A Love Song for Latasha* is also an affecting expression of how we briefly bring the people who are special to us back to life in the act of remembering, through love and grief alike.

[A Love Song for Latasha](https://www.netflix.com/title/81304985?ref=hyperallergic.com) *is available on Netflix.*