Strong Island is a meditative, deeply felt and personal documentary, made be Yance Ford about the death of his/her brother, William. William was shot after a petty dispute. His killer was never brought to trial. The documentary analyses the impact of the death on what had been an aspirational family. Her mother was a successful teacher and William himself had just qualified as a correctional officer at the time of his death. Following his murder, their close-knit family was devastated by the way that the state refused to bring his killer to trial. Had the tables been turned, had William been white and his killer black, they had no doubt that justice would have been pursued. There are other aspects of the case which the film touches on, albeit in fleeting detail, such as the unmarked car that sat outside the family home in the days after William’s death and the calls in the middle of the night. But, more than anything else, it feels as though the making of this film is a cathartic, necessary journey for the filmmaker, whose face is captured in vivid close-up, wrestling with the duty bequeathed to ensure that a brother’s death would not be forgotten; that the art of the director’s cinema would offer at least a hint of justice, where the processes of the state have offered none.
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