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Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
Movie: Strong Island
Director: Yance Ford
Available on: Netflix
There is barely a moment in Strong Island, the Netflix documentary that premieres today, that isn’t suffused with anger. Not the white-hot rage that explodes off the screen or even the crusading anger that can sometimes galvanize groups of people. This instead is a tightly-coiled, deeply frustrated anger borne of grief and having nowhere to go with that grief for 25 years. Yance Ford has directed a movie about the death of his brother that distills this kind of frustration into something heartbreaking, but that’s what makes it a vital and powerful film.
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. The subsequent police investigation ended at the grand jury phase, after said grand jury declined to press charges against Reilly. Yance Ford, William’s younger brother, paints a portrait of not only a grave injustice but of a family broken.
The Fords’ move out to Long Island is told as the story of Yance’s parents, who wanted better for their children than the acidic racism of the Jim Crow south. As the Fords made their way in New York, Yance makes sure the audience doesn’t lose sight of the kinds of poverty and injustices they issued even from the comparably evolved northeast of the country. Yance interviews his mother, sister, and William’s 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. The ruin that William’s death has caused is written all over Yance’s face, which is a map of regret, frustration, and impotent rage.
Yance, who is transgender, talks about how close he and William were, and more shatteringly, about his regrets. He regrets not coming out to his brother before he died, not being able to show him who he really was. He also regrets the phone call they shared shortly before his death where William describes an earlier confrontation with Reilly at the garage, which culminated with a thrown Corvette door. 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. Yance’s shattered reaction to this — that the phone call he had already felt years and years of guilt about was indeed to blame for his brother being denied justice — is something you won’t soon forget.
In January, Strong Island won the Sundance Film Festival special jury award for storytelling, with Netflix acquiring the film soon after. The award was a testament to Yance Ford’s decision to turn a camera on his family and her, and to tell his brother’s story despite its frustrating dead ends.
