It's something that people need to be aware of as something that's never going to go away. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Director: Yance Ford "Strong Island" tells the story of William Ford Jr., a 24-year-old African-American who was shot by Mark Reilly, a white car mechanic, during a dispute over repairs. Signup for Breaking News Alerts & Newsletters. Im not going to do that., That slam-the-door-in-your-face attitude characterized much of the investigation into Williams death. Jesmyn Wards Haunted Novel of the Gulf Coast. 793, This story has been shared 758 times. Yance Ford: I was at Sundanceit was maybe our second screeningand someone in the audience during the Q&A said she'd been in the Bronx ADA's office for 18 years, and that in her opinion, something very wrong happened with this case. A Yanceville Films and Louverture Films production, Strong Island was produced by Ford and Joslyn Barnes and was co-produced by Signe Byrge Srensen for Final Cut for Real. with when it came to their dealings with black people. Dunmore Ford Do you think audiences are ready to ask those questions? Triangle of Sadness Ending Explained: Does Abigail Kill Yaya? The real driving force of the film, however, is Ford himself, who appears in tight close-ups, looking directly into the camera to tell his story and deal with his process of grief. How many of those murders aren't even being investigated? The generational exchange that was once 2,555, This story has been shared 2,297 times. great disservice in raising him the way we did, she says. Update January 24, 2018: Strong Island has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, making Ford the first trans person to ever receive an Oscar . although the property taxes were high. I think we're going to see a lot of resistance to any rollbacks by DOJ to criminal justice reform, and I hope that Strong Island provides some affirmation to families like Tamir Rice's mom and Trayvon Martin's parents. own brother, a black teacher, William Ford, Jr., who grew up in the And it's not over yet. After an argument over the delays, William, an unarmed, black 24-year-old teacher, was slain by Mark Reilly, a 19-year-old white man who was working at an auto body shop on Long Island. Deadline is a part of Penske Media Corporation. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. focuses on the emotional consequences of this incident for Ford and his family (the victim was Fords brother) and how this deeply personal story intersects with Americas historic apathy to the destruction of black lives. Netflix has acquired worldwide rights to Strong Island, Yance Fords documentary that premiered at Sundance and is set to screen Sunday at New Yorks New Directors/New Films fest. schools, because, in reality, the public schools werent good enough, The house had a stillness unlike anything Ive ever felt in my life, Barbara remembers of the aftermath of her sons death. When I spoke with Yance by phone, he was a mix of overwhelmed and composed. . Her father died of an asthma Screen Slate is a guide to moving image culture. The Strong Island is an American 2017 true-crime documentary film directed by Yance Ford . Netflix/Strong Island The Fords had moved to Long Island from. 2023 Deadline Hollywood, LLC. Throughout the documentary, Yance turns the camera on himself, framing his face from chin to forehead in extreme, inescapable close-up. STRONG ISLAND chronicles the arc of the Ford family; Barbara Dunmore, William Ford and their three children, and how their lives have been shaped by the enduring By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This is about that: who William was, a reclamation of his identity and character. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. What happened in 1992 was the murder of Yances Send us a tip using our annonymous form. 947, This story has been shared 852 times. actor Ken Curtis Its a talk rooted in black history, and When I say, "How do you measure the distance of reasonable fear?," it's a real question. She wonders how she could have been so wrong. Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy, a weekly podcast of conversations with filmmakers, writers, musicians, journalists, and, once, his mother. Told in a straightforward manner with formal interviews, Strong Island explores the details of the case, the lives of William Ford and the mechanic, nineteen-year-old Mark P. Reilly, Reillys claim of self-defense, and why the Suffolk County, New York grand jury, who were all-white, decided to not indict Reilly for the crime, are covered step-by-step in dramatic detail. Its impossible to ignore who the surviving Fords in We depend on your memberships and donations. . As the documentary sense of the experience of watching Strong Island, in which the visual All Rights Reserved. Although Ford was unarmed, he . inside themselves, away from family connection. Watch Strong Island (2017) online. Netflix describes Fords film as a deeply intimate and meditative film. His tow truck had hit them two months This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. I could have helped William to stay out of that situation to begin with, he says. Yance Fords hands shuffling the photographs, laying them out, and Yance All the essentials: top fashion stories, editors picks, and celebrity style. There is no hint of Rodney King or the In Strong Island, Ford chronicles hisfamilys history from the Jim Crow South to the presumed safety of New Yorks middle-class suburbs, where the 1992murder of the directors brother raised deep issues of race, grief, injustice and gun violence. As the title of the film indicates, the events of the film take place on Long Island, New York, where in April of 1992, William Ford Jr., a black 24 year-old teacher, was killed by Mark Reilly, a white 19-year-old mechanic after a series of arguments that began with a fender-bender. We're a long way from there. Reilly claimed self-defense. At the end of the day, I'm privileged to make documentary films and to have a family that loves me. In a week where a reality TV favourite finally addressed its known colorism problem, Netflix UK dropped The Strays (February 22) a psycholo, Over the decades, popular culture has created dominant narratives of the Dominican Republic that are most often synonymous with poverty, crime, or state vi, This story contains spoilers for Ant-Man: Quantumania. was herself a girl when she taught her own mother to read and write. autopsy report. shielded the white youth immediately, never doubting his testimony that And if we're going to focus on me as a transgender African American, then we need to extrapolate from the violence that's perpetrated against trans women of color especially: How many of those murders have gone unsolved? This story has been shared 3,511 times. All rights reserved. Get our latest storiesin the feed of your favorite networks. the auto mechanic had had no reason to be fearful during either of his government employees who could afford to be homeowners. Strong Island, a documentary chronicling the 1992 murder of first-time filmmaker Yance Ford's brother, William Ford Jr., and the effect it had on him and his family, incorporates the dynamics of a police-like procedural and gut-wrenching, upfront, self- confession. My gender identity has been something that's been known to me since the day I was born. Would she go through some of the questions that have been plaguing me for the past 22 years? asks Yance. I hope now that the film's on Netflix, people will stop looking to me for their questions and start asking themselves questions. Reilly shot Ford through the heart with a rifle but an all-white grand jury, after a less-than-enthusiastic investigation, declined to issue an indictment, and the case died. Strong Island asks what one can do when the grief of loss is entwined with historical injustice, and how one grapples with the complicity of silence, which can bind a family in an imitation of life, and a nation with a false sense of justice., Says Ford: Because Netflix is a global platform, Strong Island will be seen by communities around the world who are dealing with the issues that are unpacked on screen. What We Know, The 8 Best Soundbars To Buy In 2023, Per Experts. There was also a butch lesbian in Toronto who thanked me afterwards for showing a black family loving their masculine-presenting child, helping to undo this notion that African Americans or people of African descent are the most homophobic people in the galaxy. . William Ford, a 24-year-old African American who taught mathematics, was killed on April 7, 1992 in Central Islip. It draws a line around your life, she says. return a true bill because her son was a black man. How Black Lives Matter Is Resisting Trump. Ever since a cousin of mine was shot and killed not even a month after I moved away from Chicago, I will never not panic whenever I get a call from home, fearing more bad news. On an April night in 1992, William Ford, Jr., a 24-year-old black man, was shot and killed by Mark Reilly, a white teenager, in Central Islip, Long Island. On Sept. 15, Netflix dropped new documentary Strong Island, . . Ford was black, Reilly white. It is jagged with anger. The children . 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Dunmore Ford died during the making of the documentary, an For ten years Ford was privileged to work as Series Producer for the PBS showcase POV and where his curatorial work helped garner more than 16 Emmy nominations. Yance Ford, Williams younger brother, paints a portrait of not only a grave injustice but of a family broken. Are we interrogating reasonable fear enough? The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Review: Strong Island Explores a Killing and Its Aftermath, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/movies/strong-island-review.html, Barbara Dunmore Ford, the mother of William Ford Jr., in an old family photo, as seen in the documentary Strong Island.. protective her brother was, and that she was the first person to tell An all-white grand jury refused to indict, accepting it as a case of self-defense. Ford is also an architectural welder, and while at Modern Art Foundry he helped assemble the sculpture "Maman" by Louise Bourgeoisthe series of three spiders exhibited at Rockefeller Center, and now on permanent display at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. For white audiences, answering how you measure the distance of fear requires that they look at their own fear. William Ford, Sr. had hoped to be a draftsman, but in order to take care When Creed first premiered in 2015, the world had no idea how big it would become; after all, it was just, Rocky Balboas iconic ascent up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art out of breath and in gray joggers as Eye of the Tiger blares in the, Spoilers ahead. I'm not gonna use that word again!'". Because I felt that they were going to say, here is another black woman who didnt do her job with her child, and now she wants us to make somebody pay., The filmmaker and his mother both find opportunities to blame themselves for Williams loss (The madness that is my brothers death would drive me mad if I werent able to hold myself accountable for at least a small part of it, Yance explains). Twenty-four-year-old teacher William Ford was shot and killed after having an altercation with a white mechanic, and the killer was never charged. I hear a lot of talk on the net and on my Facebook feed about self-care, and I think that as a nation we need to understand that there are a lot of people in a lot of different positions in this society who need mental healthcare. Fords mother, Barbara It's not newit's just new to you. Reilly had William Jr. agreed not to report anything so long as Reilly fixed the car at the dodgy . The tragedy left the Fords in some deep way unable to Yet this potent film gives equal weight to complex emotions as well as bare facts. 'Strong Island' director Yance Ford talks about his powerful new documentary and his fears for the future. Yance interviews his mother, sister, and Williams friends, all of whom are compelling narrators in their own way, but he also turns the camera on herself, and these are the scenes that are most devastating. William Ford Jr. was shot and killed on April 7, 1992, an incident at the center of the documentary Strong Island. Something deep inside his family also died that night, and Yance Ford, one of Williams siblings and the films director, explores that loss, exposing a grief that is profound and agonizing. Ford and Reilly were never alone in the shop; Ford was His murderer was escorted from the crime scene without handcuffs and never prosecuted. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/StrongIsland. in his own murder. Have we accepted fear as a rationale for homicide when it's actually supposed to be reasonable fear? Just talking about my transition and when I "came out" is a bit weird, because we have this expectation that every moment of our lives and realization about ourselves is going to be lived in some public arena. The 1967 film Guess Whos Coming to Dinner starred Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton as a ne, Tessa Thompson Talks Going To Couples Therapy With Michael B. Jordan. are gripping in everything they say. 'Yellowstone' Return Date Info, Savannah Guthrie Rushed Out Of 'Today' After Testing Positive For COVID-19 During Live Broadcast, Where Is Hoda Kotb? They were doing everything inside the courtroom they expected justice. expected the repairs to take. All Rights Reserved. Strong Island won the Special Jury Award for Storytelling at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. in this film. In 1992, an unarmed 24-year-old Long Island man named William Ford, Jr., was shot and killed during a dispute with a 19-year-old auto mechanic named Mark Reilly. TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. We then see Yance get decades-old information from a police officer after literally years of trying in vain to get any information about the investigation out of the authorities who says that the earlier altercation was indeed a big part of the reason why the grand jury thought Reilly was acting in self-defense. The elderly Jewish women in Brooklyn Strong Island, a documentary chronicling the 1992 murder of first-time filmmaker Yance Ford's brother, William Ford Jr., and the effect it had on him and his family, incorporates the dynamics of a police-like procedural and gut-wrenching, upfront, self- confession. But its actually a far more personal, probing project, less a relitigation than a reckoning, less a procedural than a film about the Sisyphean task of processing terrible grief. Yance Fords extraordinary ten-years-in-the-making documentary There was also a young man in Toronto who asked me how I could reconcile Mark Reilly's fear with my brother's behavior. Tom Sizemore Dies: 'Saving Private Ryan' & 'Black Hawk Down' Star Was 61; Reactions + Career In Photos, A24 Buys Historic Off Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre For $10M, Ke Huy Quan Lost Health Insurance After Filming Everything Everywhere All At Once, Jay Weston Dies: Lady Sings The Blues Producer Who Gave Al Pacino Broadway Break Was 93. Many, many times I wonder: How could I be so wrong?, Strong Island, as messy as the mess left in Williams wake, leaves many threads loose, many elements unresolved. 758, This story has been shared 673 times. Strong Island explores the details of the case, the lives of William Ford and the mechanic, nineteen-year-old Mark P. Reilly, Reilly's claim of self-defense . from the last pages of William Ford, Jr.,s journal, and from his Yance, who is transgender, talks about how close he and William were, and more shatteringly, about his regrets. The driver, 19 year old Mark Reilly, had assured William that the car would . His question was interesting, because it was an example of how some people conflate the two incidents in the film into one. William Ford, a black man, was shot and killed at the age of 24 by a 19-year-old mechanic named Mark Reilly, at the auto shop where Ford's girlfriend's car was being repaired. Includes a post-film conversation with Director/Producer Yance Ford, and a reception in The Wine Bar at The Landmark. Reilly shot Ford through the heart with a rifle but an all-white grand jury, after a less-than-enthusiastic investigation, declined to issue an indictment, and the case died. William Jr., the Ford's eldest child, a black 24 year-old teacher, was killed by Mark Reilly, a white 19 year-old mechanic. Perhaps she He was Williams confidante when the latter called to brag about the incident with the vacuum cleaner. Ford again went to the auto shop and was killed. Reilly, who is white, was arrested for manslaughter. children to judge people by their character, not by the color of their It proved that sometimes people will hear what they want to hear in the way that they want to hear itbut I was able to answer him and ask a question about who he was. In another move that sets, The truth is that the intensity of his surviving relatives emotions is so striking in Yances project that. attack, unattended in the colored section of a hospital waiting room. killed, and what happened during the investigation, but also what By signing up you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. When do you think the punishing stops? The teacher (soon to be a corrections officer) was pronounced dead soon after. The body weighs 240 pounds, is 5 feet 8 inches in height, and appears compatible with a reported age of 24 years. Yance aims to reanimate that corpse. Would you like to receive invitations to our screenings? Bobby Hadid joined the N.Y.P.D. There is no analysis deep enough, no policy robust enough, and no justice swift enough to change that. dont run. Dunmore Ford, an educator who founded Rosewood, a school for women on My sister is my best friend. Although Ford was unarmed, he became the prime. It creaks under the weight of the anguish it bears. story itself. VICE: Watching the film again reminded me of how uniquely affecting it is. Ford was unarmed. The great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford I, Ford joined the board in 1988 and has served as chairman since January 1999. Who married John Ford's daughter? Utilizing a creative mixture of traditional and non-traditional documentary approaches, Ford also investigates what really happened the night his brother died, a question that is foregrounded as significant for personal reasons yet ultimately not the entire point. Strong Island opens up with the mother . if youre uncomfortable with me asking these questions, you should All families have their own stories; the Fords' story is one of bloodshed. Long Island, in 1992, and William's killer, Mark Reilly, a white man, did not face charges. makes plain, the grand jury didnt care to find out what really 'Mandalorian' Funko Pops up to 77% Off Baby Yoda and More for Season 3, Who Plays the Armorer in 'The Mandalorian'? Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan. I'm afraid that our civil society is being torn apart bit by bitand not just by tweets and ridiculous statements about good people on both sides. Were Strong Island a strict procedural, that exclusion would be more glaring. How Playwright Sam Hunter Processed His Own Trauma, Who Plays Kam Evans on 'Sex/Life' Season 2? held onto Fords girlfriends car for longer than the couple had You know what it means to live a life where you have to map the airports that have family bathrooms so you can go into a restroom and not feel either endangered because people can be violent if they think that you're a short gay manor if women in the ladies room think that you're a man in the women's room and call the cops?
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