In April 1992, Yance Ford's brother, William, then a 24-year-old teacher, was killed by a white 19-year-old mechanic. Although the Long Island police investigated the case, the shooting was deemed justifiable by a grand jury and the shooter never faced any consequences. William was unarmed.
"Everyone's life (in my family) got picked up and put down in a place that was completely unfamiliar," said Ford, who was 19 and a student at Hamilton College at the time. "The criminal justice system said, 'Good luck,' and walked away."
This was a time long before social media campaigns and cellphones, but Ford's family and community used whatever means at their disposal _ petitions, letters, phone calls _ to seek justice.
"Once the community exhausted its resources, we were supposed to go back to regular life," Ford continued. "Regular life isn't regular after something like this." An "inevitable shadow of grief and loss" set in over the family, as well as countless unanswered questions about how justice had evaded them.
Ford now has answers, 25 years later, as shown in the documentary "Strong Island," streaming on Netflix.
The film, which won a special jury prize at Sundance, charts Ford's journey to reconnect with the officers and prosecutors involved in the case and discover how the grand jury could have made its decision. Featuring interviews with Ford's mother and sister, it's an intimate meditation of how a family's tragedy is situated in an institutionalized fear of blackness and how a loved one's unexplainable death has enduring impact decades later.
The Times spoke with Ford about his brother, the 10 years it took to make the film and the opportunity for "Strong Island" to reach viewers across the globe.
Q: Why explore your brother's death through film?
A: I was an art student when William was killed and started putting his death into my work. In 2006, after doing a workshop at a nonprofit in New York, the weight of the silence around my brother's death was growing.
A friend and mentor asked me, when I finally told her I had a brother and he had been murdered, what I had been waiting for. I didn't have an answer. That's when I started.
Q: It was a 10-year process. How was it discovering the information revealed in the film?
A: I used a private investigator to locate a lot of the people who had been involved with the case. Making the film involved two things. One was the easy part of asking my family to sit down and talk to me. The difficult part was making the phone calls, being afraid and knowing on some level that this wasn't necessarily a fool's errand. But I had to constantly check my expectations that people who had done a lackluster and half-hearted attempt to bring my brother's case to trial would be _ 15, 16, 17, 18 years later _ interested in talking to me about it. The first phone call in the film demonstrates that.
It was a constant process of confronting my fear and then overcoming it. And I'm not typically a fearful person, so to find myself in this dynamic again, which was just like the dynamic in 1992, is, I think, why the film has such an energy to it.
Q: Why did you include yourself in the film?
A: I had a list of 10 rules when I first started. The first rule was "Yance will not be in the film." We got to the end of the long rough cut, and I realized I only had one-third of the story. I didn't have my sister or me, and I had my mother in her sadness but not her anger. When I took a step back _ and because this isn't the type of film you can do twice _ I knew I had to get it right the first time and that I needed to re-approach the film. One of the first things my team and I did was watch the interviews. I admitted that my character could and should function as the connective tissue.
Q: Who are the filmmakers you used as inspiration?
A: The entire canon of cutting-edge African American filmmakers like Julie Dash, Marlon Riggs, Isaac Julien, Spike (Lee) obviously. But also people like Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman and Patricio Guzman, people who've taken their stories and used it to illuminate moments in history and make their stories larger than themselves.
"Strong Island" could be just a film about my family, or it could be a film about what's been happening in our country for generations. Those are the people who helped me see that it was my obligation to make it larger.
Q: What is the usefulness of Netflix releasing the film worldwide?
A: For as much as we are able to activate around families who lose loved ones, we must understand that the needs of these families are going to exceed the amount of time that we are able to pay attention to them, because there has always been the next shooting. In the United States, I hope the film can help activists understand that part of what needs to happen is, as everyone is talking about self-care as a present-tense thing, it needs to be something that lasts a lifetime, and especially for these families. I think about Trayvon Martin's parents 20 years from now. What are they going to be like? What are they going to need?
I've also been all over the world with this film, and I hear from people that it's like this case or that case. When I was in the U.K. in June, a young man who was running away from a cop attempted to swallow something, and in an attempt to prevent this person from doing harm to themselves, the cop tried to pull out whatever was in his throat and he choked to death. He died, on camera. It's important to realize these things are happening outside of the bubble of America. Violence against the other, and the way we otherize people out of fear, has to be examined across the board.
