Strong Island

A Oscar nominated documentary from 2017. It entails the trek to Long Island by the Fords, an African American family & how during their stay, the elder son tragically lost his life during a verbal altercation w/a white individual. One night out, the son was driving his vehicle when a tow truck, w/its lights out, collided w/him prompting the owner to offer his body shop's services to make repairs. As weeks drove on & hostilities began to surface, the son made an ill-timed decision to confront the owner of the repair establishment leading to one of the employees to pull out .22 rifle & fire, killing the son instantly. We follow Yance Ford's journey in trying to glean some meaning by her brother's death especially from all accounts he was a thoughtful & respected man even intervening in another occasion apprehending a person who was the perpetrator of a shooting. The subject matter is heart wrenching but ultimately I have to judge the film by its construction & not by its importance which I think is evidenced by the unusual decision to begin a recap of a particular event near the doc's last 15 minutes making the film feel like its spinning its wheels as it were but if one can overlook this lapse in presentation then this potent story is another all too familiar modern discourse of our current racial polemics.

Unfortunately this was painted to be a compelling story of mis-justice that was then solved or at least contested but it was nothing more than a diary or almost autobiography of someone we'd never heard of. The constant reference to Racism in the families past was almost building up to some sort of mis-justice due to race or color but that didn't seem to be the case. There was parts talking about the struggle of coming to terms with sexuality and growing up which seemed completely irrelevant to the confusing story line that zigzagged at the speed of a snail. Don't get my wrong its a sad story, no one should be murdered and no one should have to deal with a death in family but I just couldn't help but feel this documentary was almost the director/producers way of dealing with it rather than it shedding any light on a given subject. This was almost a professionally shot YouTube video certainly not fit for mainstream Netflix.

The whole point of this documentary is to humanize the victim and show the viewers the human side of this story. It just baffles me how some people here couldn't grasp this simple emotional-based point. We do need more of this kind of documentaries for us to feel each other's pain.

I believe in black lives matter, white privilege, systemic racism, the injustice with which black men are treated...and I still don't like this decent looking, well-intentioned, but overtly manipulative doc.

I wanted this to be The Thin Blue Line. It wasn't. That's a pretty high bar for a doc. I was probably being unfair. But I was disappointed. The families rage at the murder of their son/brother came through. But the story of what happened didn't. It just felt like rage. Understandable, but not what I want in a doc.