Movie Review: Strong Island

Strong Island *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Yance Ford.

 

Documentaries made about a family, by a member of that family, aren’t often a mixed blessing. On one hand, you get access to material that no one else would ever have access to – and your family may be more candid, less on guard, when you interview them than if it’s someone they do not know as well – allowing greater insight. On the other, the filmmaker may be too close to the material to see it clearly – and ends up giving you a rather biased, or one side portrait. There is a little bit of both of those things in Strong Island – a very good documentary that bills itself as a true crime documentary – but is something more than that. Yance Ford has made the film to investigate the killing of his brother way back in the early 1990s – an unarmed, black man, who was shot and killed by a white 19 year old, who then claimed self- defense – and was never even indicted. While the film pulls back the veil on the type of story we still hear about all the time – it’s also a powerful story about grief, identity and family.

 

(Note: To avoid confusion, Yance Ford is a transgender man – although when the killing took place, he was a woman and identified as such. Ford never addresses being transgender in the doc – he does say that they are “queer” but that’s it. At the time the killing took place, he identified as a woman and a lesbian. This was confusing to me, as a few of the reviews I looked at referred to Ford as a “he” – and until I found out he was transgender, I was confused).

 

The details of the case are depressingly common. There was a traffic accident, and Ford’s brother William agreed not to go to the police if the wronged party simply took his car to their garage and fixed it themselves for free. The repairs took longer than they were supposed to – and one night, William goes down to the garage with his friends. Words are exchanged, and William is shot once, and dies right there. To both William’s family – and his friend who was on the scene that night – it appears like the cops and prosecutors always looked at the incident as self-defense – and never wanted it to be anything other than that. William Ford was just another dead, young black man. Throughout the film, Ford pieces together the crime – although it’s not much deeper than that – and a portrait of who William was leading up to his death, and the effect it had on William’s family.

 

If there is a flaw in the film, I think it’s that Ford withholds two rather critical pieces of information until fairly late in the film – one that makes her brother look bad – a previous, threatening incident at the garage, that although it never turned physically violent, lends at least some credence to the story that someone might be scared of him, and one that makes her brother look good – the courageous actions he takes to stop  a man who shot an Assistant District Attorney at an ATM, and was trying to flee the scene.

 

The film works best as a portrait of this family. After a short prologue of Ford on the phone with a former cop who investigated the death, the film heads back to the family before the killing – their lives growing up, their parents’ marriage and how they were raised – the closeness of this family. From there, it becomes a portrait of pain and grief – as the surviving family members feel ignored and pushed aside by the police – as if their feelings never did matter. How does a family pick up and pull themselves together after that? Can they?

 

The film may be a little too long for what it sets out to portray, and as mentioned, I wish it was slightly more upfront than it is. But those are minor quibbles to what I mainly thought was a powerful and timely documentary. William Ford was not killed by a police officer, but in many ways, his case resembles those we do hear about. Was it okay for the man who killed to be scared? Why was he scared – because William was black, or because of the previous incident? Did the cops really take this seriously? When Ford does get one of the investigators to talk to him, he is sympathetic, and says he did everything he could to find the truth – and he feels sincere. But what preconceived notions did he have when he started? Strong Island provides the type of glimpse into this family that we usually do not see. I have my quibbles with it, but mostly, it is a moving, deeply felt and valuable film.