Difference between revisions of "Strong Island (2017)"

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[[Category:Black Racism in Documentary Movies]]
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[[Category:Black-Targeted Racism in Documentary Movies]]

Latest revision as of 06:22, 15 March 2021

Strong Island Movie Poster

Strong Island is a American documentary film directed by Yance Ford, who tell the story based on the director's experience.This 107 minutes film released on September 15, 2017 and tells about about the death of Yance Ford's brother. An unarmed African-American man is killed, and a white murderer goes unpunished, despite only the sketchiest of evidence supporting self-defense.

Plot

Yance Ford grew up as one of the two sisters of William Ford Jr., who was killed in 1992 at the age of 24 by a 19-year-old white mechanic on a car-repair conflict. The director, now a transgender man, regrets that he has never been able to open up his admired and respected older brother to his sexual identity. But this thread feels like an insubstantial distraction, especially given the lack of related discussions with surviving family members. While there is no question of the serious intentions behind this investigation, Yance's dominant camera presence, often in tight facial close-ups, contributes in many ways to keeping William Jr. out of focus for too long.

The film, however, presents a moving portrait of a black family for whom the deeply held values of self-esteem, education, gainful employment and a middle-class aspiration ultimately counted for nothing the all-white Grand Jury that ruled not to bring the case to trial. The victims' parents, Barbara Dunmore and William Ford, left Jim Crow South in the 1960s to escape racial segregation. But after a reprimand in ethnic Brooklyn, they rediscovered marginalization in the suburbs of Long Island and again in court.[1]

Controversy

The film portrays the unresolved racial problem in the U.S., where the police and the courts cared very little about the death of a black man, and how difficult it was for a mother who tried to get her death son to justice at the time. Rather than helping the mother by getting the justice, she is still even disrespectfully labelled a black parent who couldn't control their child. "The indifference shown to her at the grand jury, and her treatment by the police, as if she were the mother of a criminal rather than a victim, are repeated more than once."[2] It also displays how a devastated family struggle to understand about what exactly happened to his son and why a Jury decided not to indict the suspect of the murdered.[3]

Reception

Through this movie, Yance Ford, the director who also a brother from the victim hopes that audiences will understand that there is an unequality for black lives in this country that we need to resolve, that we also have to care about black people when we talk about the justice. "I hope that audiences understand that there is a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address, that there has always been a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address,” he said. “In fact, our country is built on the precariousness of black lives, the disposability of black lives." He also invite the people to stop this insanity because “This is what systemic racism looks like.This is what a broken criminal justice system looks like.”[4]

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