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Thursday, April 27, 2017 Montclair Film Festival Page C-11
‘Strong Island’ brings murder home
‘Strong Island’
by GWEN OREL orel@montclairlocal.news
Making “Strong Island” was a way for Yance Ford to process the murder of his brother, William Ford Jr.
It did not provide closure.
“Closure is something that folks have come up with to hedge against the fear of something terrible happening in their lives,” Ford said. “I’m interested in a level-headed examination of the issues behind this case, for the bene- t of us all.”
Ford Jr. was killed by Mark Reilly in April 1992. Wil- liam Ford Jr. was unarmed, but the grand jury did not re- turn a “true bill,” the name for a bill of indictment when a grand jury decides there is su cient evidence to justify a case being heard. Reilly was never indicted.
Yance Ford (pronounced YAN’-see) does not spare himself, at one point realizing that some of his own words had an impact on his brother, which might have a ected how others reacted to him.
“Strong Island” includes interviews with Ford’s moth- er, a camera tight on himself; interviews with friends, o cers of the court and of the law; and Ford’s hand, accompanied by a voice-over, sorting through old pho- tographs and talking about them. He also reads from his brother’s diary.
The lm premiered at Sundance in January. It will have a theatrical release in the fall, and has been picked
COURTESY ALAN JACOBSEN
Yance Ford looks at an old photograph in “Strong Island,” his lm about his brother’s murder.
up by Net ix.
“Strong Island” is in the documentary feature com-
petition in Montclair Film Festival, and inclusion in the Montclair Film Festival is part of a partnership with the American Black Film Festival. The big question Ford wanted to raise, he said, was the di erence between rea- sonable and unreasonable fear. Reilly got away with kill- ing Ford’s brother because a grand jury felt his fear for his life was reasonable.
“My brother was not killed by a police o cer,” Ford
Saturday May 6, 4 p.m. and Sunday, May 7, 1:45 p.m. Clairidge Theater, 486 Bloom eld Ave.
“Emerging Black Voices” panel with Iyabo Boyd, Sabaaj Folayan and Yance Ford
said. “But the person who killed him was white. The nar- rative of the fear of black men, the fear of black men’s bodies being turned into weapons, needs to be deeply interrogated.” His brother’s death is “a point in a line of American racialized murders in America, that in the lm you see goes back in the family to 1944. In our culture it goes much farther back.” Transcripts of what happens in grand jury deliberations are secret, by law. Ford said,“I absolutely think witnesses need protection. But I do not think anyone can say nothing ever goes wrong, and we don’t need a system to check and see.”
His mother wonders, in the lm, how a person on a grand jury can come backwith an important decisionwhen they are doing a crossword puzzle or reading a magazine. She says, “I will die believing that they didn’t care because my son was a young man of color. I will always believe that. Always.”
Ford didn’t attempt to interview Reilly. “I have no in- terest in him. He’s simply the spark that took my family on a 20-year string of consequences.”
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