New York --"I believe my son was a sacrificial lamb," Mrs. Mamie Till Mobley says toward the end of Keith Beauchamp's documentary film "The Untold Story of Emmett Till" that had a premiere screening last Saturday at New York University's Cantor Film Center. "I think the Lord had a purpose for him and he served it well."

Till was a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955 when he became the victim of white racism that many believe sparked the civil rights movement.

According to numerous history books, Till, on a dare from his cousin, took his big city ways into a store and to speak to a white woman, which was a taboo in the land of Jim Crow. His subsequent "wolf whistle" at Carolyn Bryant set off a chain of events that 47 years later begs for justice.

"Emmett had a speech impediment," Mrs. Mobley said in the 75-minute film, "and I told him that when this occurred for him to whistle." Apparently Till was asking Mrs. Bryant for some bubble gum and stammered on the "b-sound" and whistled in order to continue his purchase. This fact and several others presented by witnesses, many of whom have never publicly talked about the incident, raises a number of baffling questions.

Did Till actually blow a flirtatious whistle? Was he shot in the head and castrated? Were there two black men who knew of the crime and refused to talk? The contradictions surrounding the death of Till leap from the film and from editor Christopher Metress's book "The Lynching of Emmett Till, which is like a companion narrative to the film.

What is indisputable, however, is that Till was abducted one morning three days after his encounter with Mrs. Bryant by her husband, Roy, and his friend, J.W. Milam. Beauchamp deftly allows the story to develop, using clips of Mose Wright, Till's great uncle, recounting how his nephew was abducted. When the narrative continues, it is Mrs. Mobley's turn to tell how she was called to identify her son's mutilated body that was found in the Tallahatchie River.

"They had him a box, larger than anyone I've ever seen," Mrs. Mobley, 80, began. "I asked them to open it and I discovered that it was covered with lime. I told them to remove the lime so I could see his face." What she saw was what the world saw in Jet magazine in 1955. Till's face was battered beyond recognition. "His left eye was hanging down on his cheek, his nose was bashed in and it was if someone had taken an axe and chopped his face away from the rest of his head," his mother said in the film, recalling a scene she had probably told hundreds of times.

Milam and Bryant were tried in Sumner, Mississippi, and one of the most memorable moments at the trial was when Mr. Wright stood up and pointed to Milam as being one of the men who abducted Till. "Thar he," Wright said. Such an accusation, a black man charging a white man with a crime, was unheard of in Dixie at that time. "He was a brave man and unafraid," said his son, Simeon Wright, who was among the witnesses in the film and one of several family members and friends attending the screening.

Beauchamp, 31, a native of Louisiana who lives in Brooklyn, said he had seen Till's picture in Jet magazine when he was 10 while rummaging through some old books and magazines. He asked his parents about it and they explained it, and it could have been a cautionary tale for Beauchamp, who later was dating interracially. "It stayed on my mind for years and I knew I had to do something about it," he said. After seven years of research, writing, traveling, and raising funds, he was able to complete the film, which he admits is still a work in progress.

Why now, when so few know about Till and what happened to him? he was asked. "Because it is a story that needs to be told," Beauchamp answered. Another film on Till by Stanley Nelson is expected to be released in the spring.

"We have to keep telling the story to raise people's consciousness and until justice prevails," Mrs. Mobley added during a panel discussion after the film, moderated by author/historian Robin Kelley.

After their trial, Milam and Bryant confessed that they had abducted and killed Till, but they were protected by double jeopardy. Both are now dead, according to Metress.

The screening of the film was a joint venture sponsored by QBR: The Black Book Review, the University of Virginia Press, and the Institute of African-American Affairs and the Africana Studies Department at New York University. It was unclear about further screenings and if a distributor had acquired the film.