Between 1979 and 1981, the city of Atlanta, Georgia lived through a long run of disappearances and killings whose victims were Black children and young adults. Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children, a 2020 American documentary series, goes back to that period and to the questions it left behind.
What is Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children about?
The series takes as its subject a span of roughly two years in which at least thirty African-American children and young adults in Atlanta went missing or were found murdered. Across five parts, it sets out what is known about the cases, placing them in the city where they happened and among the families and neighbourhoods that lived through them. Rather than treating the events as a closed chapter, the programme looks again at the record: how the cases were handled at the time, what the affected community was asking for, and why the subject has continued to be discussed in Atlanta in the decades since. Each instalment runs about an hour.
About the cast
As a documentary, the series has no dramatic cast in the usual sense. The catalogue credits Stu James among its participants, and no director is named in the listing we hold. Works of this kind are carried by real voices and by the documentary record, not by performances, so the names attached to it are fewer than those of a scripted drama.
Context & significance
Long-form true-crime documentaries have become a major part of television over the past decade, and many of the most discussed examples return to older cases instead of new ones. This series belongs to that group. Its length matters: five hour-long parts give far more room than a single feature documentary, which allows a case involving dozens of victims to be laid out with some care and without being compressed into a headline. The subject is also a piece of American civic history. The events took place in a large Southern city, the victims were young and African-American, and the cases drew national attention at the time. Viewers should know in advance that the material concerns violence against children and is heavy by nature. The series has been well received and is regarded as a serious treatment of its subject.
Watching Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children on Ktime
All five parts are on K-Time. Anyone can read this page; watching the episodes requires signing in to a K-Time account. K-Time is a Persian-focused streaming service for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi interface that makes it easy to find international documentaries alongside Iranian films and series.