‘4 Little Girls’

From “Do the Right Thing” to “Get on the Bus,” director Spike Lee has made some of the most hard-edged and unsettling American films on racism and its effects. Yet none has been as moving as this, his first feature-length documentary. On one level “4 Little Girls” details the Sept. 15, 1963, bombing of Birmingham, Ala.’s 16th Street Baptist Church that claimed four young victims (Denise McNair, Cynthia Mosely, Addie Mae Collins and Carol Robertson, from left) who were attending Sunday school in the building’s basement. One of the film’s aims, which it realizes, is to make these four girls, ages 11 through 14, into real people whose absence we feel as much as their parents, relatives, friends and neighbors who are interviewed about their loss. It is especially shocking, somehow, to see the girls’ childhood friends, not frozen in time like the victims, but now adults in their 40s still haunted by what went on. But “4 Little Girls” goes further. With the ability to smoothly interweave the personal and the political, it serves as a window into the entire civil rights movement, a look at a society that needed to change and at the people who saw to it that change took place (HBO Monday at 9 p.m.; Thursday at 11:15 a.m. and 7:15 p.m.; Saturday at 5 p.m.).