A new doc asks: What was really behind Vancouver's 2011 Stanley Cup mayhem?

Filmmakers Kat Jayme and Asia Youngman both vividly remember the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riots that trashed downtown and saw cop cars ablaze. The lifelong Vancouverites are roughly the same age as many of the rioters and long wondered what sparked the violence that day. Their new film, I'm Just Here for the Riot, explores both the lead-up to the riots and their aftermath.

"I was with my friends at home," says Jayme about the day of the game. "I couldn't believe that we lost."

Youngman, who was downtown that night, came even closer to getting caught up in the mayhem. "We fled downtown right away," she says. "But I sometimes wonder — I was 19 at the time, I was downtown for all the playoff games — if I didn't have a ride [and] I stayed downtown, you never know, right?"

When the pair met, they realized that they had a common interest in trying to better understand the riot: how seemingly normal young people could engage in wanton acts of destruction, how others got caught in an online witch hunt to find the perpetrators, and how technology played a role in both.

The riots happened at a unique juncture in recent history — a time when smartphones and social media were becoming widespread, but we didn't yet understand the potential ramifications of them. During the riots, people posed in front of burning cars, wrote statuses about looting, and filmed each other breaking windows, not thinking those images would be used against them.

"People…  wanted to show off and write about what they were doing," says Jayme. "Like, 'I'm here in front of an exploding car … ' People were taking photos, writing Facebook statuses, uploading everything to social media without realizing that they were incriminating themselves."

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