One of the most disputed moments in Fruitvale Station (2013) is the scene wherein Grant comforts a dying dog at a gas station. Many critics have described that scene as emotionally manipulative and claimed that, for all its talk of realism, Fruitvale is hagiography and not biography. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Coogler defended the scene against accusations of emotional manipulation. While Grant never had such an interaction, Coogler’s brother did, and upon hearing the story Coogler saw that it fit in thematically with the story he wanted to tell.

“He told me that he was at a gas station and had an interaction with a dog then saw that dog get hit by a car,” Coogler says. “At that moment I thought about Oscar. I thought about all of the black males who die in the street and life goes on.”

In the film the dog Oscar meets is a pit bull, which is no accident. According to his family, Grant wanted to find a house in part because he wanted to get a dog, specifically a pit bull. Coogler found the breed an accurate metaphor for black manhood in America, saying, “You never hear about a pit bull doing anything good in the media. And they have a stigma to them ... in many ways, pit bulls are like young African-American males. Whenever you see us in the news, it’s for getting shot and killed or shooting and killing somebody—for being a stereotype.” For Coogler the choice had enough artistic truth because it happened to a young black man from the bay area, it illustrated Oscar’s actual connection with dogs, and it didn’t need to be something that actually happened to Oscar to warrant inclusion.

However, given the cinematic grittiness of DP Rachel Morrison’s work and Coogler’s insistence that the actors meet their real-life counterparts, the choice to add the meeting with the dog feels discordant with the other aspects of the film. It is a departure from reality in a film that otherwise seems to say to the audience, This is real—this is who Oscar was. While it may not be outright manipulation, the scene undercuts the docu-realism of the rest of the film, which opens with the cell-phone footage of Grant’s death and closes with news clips of the ensuing riots in Oakland. The debate raises the question of the moral implications of artistic license in films based on real events.