Strong Island

Late on a spring evening in 1992, in the park­ing lot of a Long Island body shop, a 24-year-old man named William Ford was shot dead by a 19-year old mechan­ic, Mark Riley. William was black and unarmed. His killer was white. Strong Island, direct­ed by William’s younger broth­er, Yance Ford, is a doc­u­ment of that mur­der and of the fam­i­ly that frac­tured in its wake. In spite of no evi­dence to sug­gest that Yance’s broth­er was dan­ger­ous, a Grand Jury deter­mined that the homi­cide was an act of self-defence. Accord­ing to them, no crime had been com­mit­ted. The case didn’t even make it to trial.

In his doc­u­men­tary Strong Island, Ford offers a remark­able, inci­sive exam­i­na­tion of his own fam­i­ly his­to­ry, har­ness­ing a long-ges­tat­ing grief and chan­nelling it into an emo­tion­al­ly drain­ing but vital piece of work. Build­ing from his par­ents’ meet­ing and mar­riage in 1965, Ford uses inti­mate inter­views along­side joy­ful fam­i­ly pho­to album inserts. Speak­ing to his moth­er, sis­ter and close fam­i­ly friends, he gives a sense of the close-knit hap­pi­ness of the Ford fam­i­ly – before the stag­ger­ing trau­ma inflict­ed on them by William’s mur­der. The film bal­ances the del­i­cate world of per­son­al bereave­ment with a method­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of a bro­ken jus­tice sys­tem. It takes an unswerv­ing scalpel to the fin­er details of the case.

Using star­tling close-ups of his face in direct address to the cam­era, Yance’s con­fes­sion­al and frank mus­ings punc­tu­ate the film’s nar­ra­tive. Near the begin­ning, he says, ​“I’m not angry. But I’m also not will­ing to allow some­one else to get to say who William was.” Instead, we see the real man, sketched through diary entries, pho­tos, anec­dotes and even sur­pris­ing accounts of per­son­al hero­ism. The film steadi­ly undoes the face­less vic­tim cliché́, just as much as it reveals the absur­di­ty of the ​‘scary black man’ narrative.

There’s a sin­u­ous inter­nal rhythm to Strong Island, and every styl­is­tic feels like it has been ful­ly con­sid­ered. It avoids show­er­ing too many facts on the audi­ence all at once, care­ful­ly with­hold­ing piv­otal pieces of infor­ma­tion as a way to devel­op the dra­ma. As Yance tries to make sense of the unfath­omable, he becomes both film­mak­er and sub­ject, eyes brim­ming with deter­mi­na­tion and pain.

The larg­er impli­ca­tions of this injus­tice are nev­er lost on Ford, who builds the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal details of his fam­i­ly life as inex­tri­ca­ble from the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can racism. His par­ents orig­i­nal­ly hailed from Charleston, South Car­oli­na, where they left the Jim Crow South and worked their way up to the mid­dle class sub­urbs of New York. But racial ani­mus was nev­er far behind. The Ford fam­i­ly were deter­mined to raise their chil­dren in an envi­ron­ment where – in Mrs Ford’s words – ​“char­ac­ter, not colour” mat­tered most. But in light of dozens more cas­es involv­ing the deaths of unarmed black men, the details of William Ford’s sto­ry are trag­i­cal­ly familiar.

Yance and William’s moth­er, Bar­bara – a life­long edu­ca­tor – is in many ways the emo­tion­al anchor of the film. Inter­viewed in her kitchen over long peri­ods, she is artic­u­late, warm, and insight­ful. ​“I did William a great dis­ser­vice rais­ing him the way we did,” Bar­bara says. She’d always avoid­ed instill­ing fear or doubt about race into her kids. She nev­er asked them to be mind­ful or cau­tious of oth­er people’s racism. How heart­break­ing that her phi­los­o­phy could ever be per­ceived as unwise.