Strong Island

I fail to understand any reviewers who did not / could not appreciate this brilliant docu. Incredibly shot and edited. The quietness is especially compelling. The photographs contributed to the cinematic value. I struggle to understand how other reviewers wanted this story to be something else when this is the family's story. It is their lived experience. Congrats to Yancy for their achievements.

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.

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.

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.

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.