Between 2017 and … just last month, the Confederate monument debate raged at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The statue in question is “Silent Sam,” erected in 1913 by the Daughters of the Confederacy in concert with university alumni. Like the controversial Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, the monument serves as an everyday affront to black people on campus. Directors Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky capture the raw immediacy of the unfolding drama, including protests and counterprotests, as tensions ratchet ever higher. But The Commons offers something far deeper: The filmmakers build a convincing, transcendent elegy for the loss of civil public dialogue in society. Plays with “The Changing Same” (dirs. Michèle Stephenson & Joe Brewster, 22 min.), which follows Lamar Wilson as he runs 13 miles retracing the terror of the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal in the Florida Panhandle. (PS)