Strong Island (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Strong Island |
| Country of production | USA , Denmark |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2017 |
| length | 107 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Yance Ford |
| production | Yance Ford, Joslyn Barnes |
| music |
Hildur Guðnadóttir , Craig Sutherland |
| camera | Alan Jacobsen |
| cut | Janus Billeskov Jansen |
| occupation | |
| |
Strong Island is a documentary by Yance Ford that celebrated its world premiere on January 23, 2017 as part of the US Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival . From February 12, 2017, the film was presented in the main Panorama program of the 67th Berlinale . The film chronicles the circumstances that led to the violent death of his brother William twenty years earlier, the impact his murder had on him and his family, and how the legal system failed in this case, resulting in the killer being released.
In November 2017, the film was named Best Documentary at the Gotham Awards . As part of the 2018 Academy Awards , it was also nominated for best documentary .
action
The story goes of the African American William Ford Jr. out and about in his car with his sister Lauren. After an accident with a white car mechanic, he offers to repair the damage if he does not call the police. William soon notices that Mark Reilly, the mechanic's name, is actually the head of a gang of car crackers and that the workshop located in his garage is used for criminal purposes. When he visits him a few weeks later, accompanied by his friend Kevin, who is waiting in the car, and tells him he would blow his business up if he were a police officer, there was an argument. Reilly shoots the young African American in the chest. William Ford just manages to get out of the garage. The police, who hit the scene quickly, prevent Kevin from going to his friend, and William dies lying alone in the entrance to the garage. Mark Reilly is taken away by the police without being handcuffed. It is April 7, 1992 when William Ford dies and the life of his entire family is shaken at the same time. The young African American was 24 years old at the time.
The mother, the film tells us, refused to speak to her daughters about what had happened to William, and the family had never sat down to do this. In the film, Ford reads a letter written by his mother to Reilly's defense attorney, Mrs. Caterson, in which she indicates that there has been no reaction from his family or the prosecution. About the grand jury , which consists of people who are regularly re-elected and who made their decision in secret, the mother says that they were not sufficiently attentive to their testimony and that one of them even read a book when she was reading spoke. She says she burst into tears in court because she felt she did everything wrong in raising her children. But she also says that neither at the scene of the crime nor in court did she feel like a mother whose child became a murder victim. She will never get rid of the feeling, said Barbara Dunmore-Ford, that the lack of interest in the case in court stemmed from the fact that her son was black. Williams' friend Kevin also reports something similar in the film. In court he was questioned about Williams' athletic figure, Kevin said, but not about what really happened that night while visiting Reilly's garage. Ultimately, the court refused to convict the white mechanic of William's death, although there was sufficient evidence of the background to the crime and the perpetrator. The investigation was closed because the act was not counted as murder. Hit by Williams' loss on the one hand and disappointed in the legal system on the other, the family fell into a state of shock and was silent for a long time about what had happened to William.
production
Biographical background and staff
Directed by Yance Ford . The trans filmmaker and then sister of the shot William Ford Jr. sees the film as exemplary: “'Strong Island' is in a way about how easy it is to kill black people in the USA. That was true in 1992, and it still is today. ”For Ford, however, it is not just about clearing the case, but especially about the consequences for the family, because because the mechanic was not charged, the family met the stigma that William had to must have been guilty. Ford said of his parents, who had a world collapsed after climbing upscale Long Island, “My parents believed the system would work because their children never ran into the law. What they now learned was that even if they made it to the suburbs, the American dream does not apply to everyone. "
As a transgender director, Ford spent ten years as a serial producer on the television series POV , which began in 1988 and ran until 2016, which has won a number of Emmys. Ford herself was recognized as an initial companion and later producer of the long-term documentary series by the International Documentaries Association and at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards. Ford has also received various other awards and grants, including the Creative Capital Award and a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellowship. Even as an architecture Welders Ford had worked and helped the sculpture Maman by Louise Bourgeois assemble, which was exhibited at the Rockefeller Center in New York.
It is in Strong Iceland to the directorial debut of the now living in New York transsexual African American who grew up in Long Iceland, where he lived with his family a pleasant, suburbanes life. Because he believed after the death of his brother that he was going crazy with grief and because of the many open questions, Ford decided to reopen the case himself in the form of a documentary. Ford had started working with producer Esther Robinson on his project in February 2009, which gave him the opportunity to pursue his vision for Strong Island . In autumn 2010 he started working with Alan Jacobsen, who spoke his language and understood his concepts of absence and longing. He also received the support of his editor Shannon Kennedy. ”
Conception and structure of the film
Ford created Strong Island as a documentary and can also be heard as the narrator of the film. Photos from the family album are shown throughout the entire film, including some of his parents at a young age, who show them both stylishly dressed, and many of him and his siblings from their childhood and youth. Elsewhere, the director lets his mother Barbara, sister Lauren, and two of his brother's best friends have their say. The director himself can be seen talking on the phone to members of the public prosecutor's office and the police to find out details about the killing of his brother or the decision of the jury, but nobody wants to answer his questions about the case. Only one policeman takes the trouble to seek evidence from the files that were collected that night and presented to the court. In the film, Ford repeatedly shows himself in close-ups while speaking into the camera, and there are regular long shots of the garage workshop from outside, the door of which is open.
After reports of the brother's death were reported early in the film, Ford did not let the interviewees tell the exact circumstances of William's death until around the middle of the film. Ford also tells a lot about his family in general or lets them talk about their lives. His parents had moved to New York, where the father worked as a light rail driver, and later to Long Island, where blacks lived in strictly demarcated areas, but the mother accepted this because she wanted the children in a home grow up that you can call your home. The mother worked as an English teacher and later even became the head of a school. The mother later took part in an educational program for inmates in the prisons on Rikers Island . For Yance Ford and his sister, having a big brother in William was very important in their lives, as they both explain in the film.
publication
The film celebrated its world premiere on January 23, 2017 as part of the US Documentary Competition of the Sundance Film Festival , where the film received several awards. At the 67th Berlinale , the film was presented from February 12, 2017 in the Panorama section, which is traditionally dedicated to auteur films and in that year the focus was on empowering black history . It was also shown here as part of the Teddy Awards , a separate competition. From August 8, 2017, the film was presented at the Locarno International Film Festival . The film is distributed by Doc & Film International.
reception
Reviews
So far, the film has won over all Rotten Tomatoes critics and received an average rating of 8.5 out of a possible 10 points.
Thomas Hummitzsch from Rolling Stone explains what makes the film worth seeing is not the portrayal of the alleged events, but the connection with the trauma within the family and the continued racist politics in the USA. In the foreground is Ford's mother, according to Hummitzsch, who always raised her sons in the spirit of republican values. For 25 years she must have been wondering what use all her ardor has used for the imagined nation when the black body and mind (!) Are still viewed as inferior.
Awards (selection)
On December 7, 2017, it was announced that the film from which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected the nominations for the Academy Awards 2018 in the category Best Documentary was in the preselection . The official nomination followed in January 2018. The following list contains a selection of the most famous award ceremonies.
Black Reel Awards 2018
- Nomination for Best Documentary ( Yance Ford )
Critics' Choice Documentary Awards 2017
- Nomination for Best Documentary (Yance Ford)
- Nomination for Best Debut Documentary (Yance Ford)
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2017
- Received the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award (Yance Ford)
- Awarded the Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award (Yance Ford)
- Best documentary
- Nomination for the audience award
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International Documentary Association Awards 2017
- Nomination for Best Documentary (Yance Ford)
Montclair Film Festival 2017
- Awarded the Bruce Sinofsky Prize for Documentary Films (Yance Ford)
- Nomination for Best Documentary ( Joslyn Barnes and Yance Ford)
- Received the Special Jury Award for Storytelling: US Documentary (Yance Ford)
- Received the Amazon Studios Sundance Institute Producers Award (Joslyn Barnes, as producer of the film)
Web links
- Strong Iceland in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Strong Iceland - Official Film Website (English)
- Strong Island - Intimidation of Netflix on Youtube (Video, English)
- Meet the Artist '17: Yance Ford from Sundance Film Festival on Youtube (Video, English)
- Strong Island - Yance Ford in conversation with Maik Elshof at the Teddy Award (Video, English)
- Strong Island in the program of the 67th Berlinale
- Strong Island featured in the 2017 Locarno Film Festival program
Individual evidence
- ^ Christian Berndt: Films about New York parallel worlds. Life in Bubbles In: Deutschlandradio Kultur, February 13, 2017.
- ^ Strong Island
- ↑ 25 New Faces of Independent Film: Yance Ford. In: filmmakermagazine.com. Retrieved June 13, 2020.
- ↑ https://www.sundance.org/blogs/news/competition-and-next-films-announced-for-2017-festival
- ^ Program of the 67th Berlin International Film Festival. Panorama In: berlinale.de. Accessed February 18, 2017 (PDF; 23.1 MB)
- ↑ 31st Teddy Award. Program Guide In: teddyaward.tv. Retrieved February 18, 2017 (PDF; 6 MB)
- ^ Johanna Mitz: All films at the 31st Teddy Award In: teddyaward.tv, January 31, 2017.
- ^ Program of the 70th Locarno Film Festival In: pardo.ch. Retrieved on August 6, 2017 (PDF; 12.1 MB)
- ↑ Strong Island In: Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved March 17, 2018.
- ↑ https://www.rollingstone.de/berlinale-2017-eine-nation-denkt-schwarz-weiss-1199353/
- ↑ 15 Documentary Features Advance in Oscar Race In: oscars.org, December 7, 2017.
- ↑ Get Out Dominates the Black Reel Awards In: blackreelawards.com, December 13, 2017.
- ^ Second Annual Critics' Choise Documentary Awards Nominations unveiled In: criticschoice.com, October 9, 2017.
- ↑ 21st Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. 2017 Award Winners ( Memento of the original from April 17, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: fullframefest.org. Retrieved April 20, 2017.
- ↑ Gordon Cox: 'Get Out' Leads 2017 Gotham Awards Nominations In: Variety, October 19, 2017.
- ^ Anthony D'Alessandro: 'Get Out' Tops IFP Gotham Awards Nominations; 'Mudbound' Voted Special Jury Award In: deadline.com, October 19, 2017.
- ^ FD News: Dastardly Disney; IDA nominees; Snapchat shakeup; Spielberg's on a roll In: filmdaily.co, November 8, 2017.
- ↑ Hilary Lewis: Montclair Film Festival: 'Lady Macbeth', 'Strong Island' Among Award Winners In: The Hollywood Reporter, May 9, 2017.
- ↑ Dominic Patten and Patrick Hipes: Sundance Film Festival Awards: 'I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore' & 'Dina' Take Grand Jury Prizes In: deadline.com, January 28, 2017.
- ↑ Sundance 2017. Here Are the Official Winners of the Sundance Film Festival Awards In: nofilmschool.com, January 29, 2017.
