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by Kelly Anderson & Tami Gold
Inspired to act in response to the NYPD’s shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999, filmmakers Kelly Anderson and Tami Gold subsequently made the documentary film Every Mother’s Son, which premiers on PBS’s POV series August 17 at 10 pm EST and screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in May. Here they write about their decision to tell three stories of New York City police violence from the point of view of the victims’ mothers.
In 1999, when Amadou Diallo was killed in a hail of police bullets in the vestibule of his apartment building, we—like many New Yorkers—were shocked and horrified. As details emerged and we found out who Amadou was, and that he was unarmed, we asked, "How could this happen?" We went out on the streets, first to Amadou’s funeral at a mosque on 96th Street and then to the caravan that escorted his body to the airport, using our camera as a way to ask questions, talk to people, and make sense out of what seemed a senseless situation.
Five years later, this past April, we completed a documentary, Every Mother’s Son, about police brutality during Giuliani’s term (1994-2001) as mayor of New York City, told through the eyes of three mothers who lost sons to police violence and who have become spokespeople for police reform.
The decision to frame the piece around mothers was one that developed organically, as we went to events, listened to politicians and community activists, and began the groundwork of making a documentary. At every event, we noticed a group of women who always sat quietly together, as though something unspoken bonded them. They held posters and wore big buttons with pictures of young men on them. Later, we found out they were mothers of police brutality victims, and that their buttons and signs were ways of commemorating the loss of their sons, and also served as symbols of their determination that what had happened to them would never happen to another family. When these women spoke, they told powerful stories about the circumstances around their sons’ deaths and of their inability to find answers or justice from the NYPD, politicians, or the legal system.
Iris Baez’s son Anthony was killed during a pick-up football game on the streets of the Bronx in 1994, when a police officer put him in an illegal chokehold after the football hit the officer’s car. Kadiatou Diallo’s son Amadou was unarmed when he was shot 41 times in the doorway of his apartment building by four police officers. Doris Busch Boskey’s son Gary (Gidone) Busch was pepper-sprayed, surrounded, and then shot to death by police while holding a small inscribed hammer, even though witnesses at the scene said it was clear he posed no threat.
The tragedy of losing a child is compelling and emotional, and a point of identification for many audiences. We knew that presenting the victims as real people and showing the emotional toll their deaths take on their families and friends would help make the human cost of police brutality real for audiences not directly touched by the issue. But we also knew there was a danger that we would rely on the emotional pull of the individual tragedies to draw audiences in, and thus needed to engage viewers intellectually and politically. The reasons for police violence are complex and have deep systemic roots, and we wanted viewers to leave the theater understanding that the problem extends beyond "bad apples" in the police department to the persistent insularity of police culture, the prevalence of cover-ups by the police, the lack of effective civilian oversight, and the persistent inability of the justice system to put guilty police officers behind bars.
As it turned out, following Iris, Kadiatou, and Doris over five years as they searched for answers and for acknowledgment that wrong had been done gave us an opportunity to address many of these issues. First they struggled with District Attorneys to receive indictments, and often failed. The Diallo trial was moved from the Bronx to Albany, police collaborated on their testimony and lied in court, and no convictions came.
While these realities were compelling and informative, we didn’t want to leave people feeling hopeless, either. After one rough-cut screening, where many felt they needed a drink and a cigarette to recover, we realized we also had to tell the inspirational side of the story—the transformation of three women who had never been activists into national spokespeople for change. As a Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx, a West African woman who relocated to New York, and a Jewish woman from Long Island, Iris, Kadiatou, and Doris made an unlikely team. But together they formed a powerful collective voice on behalf of victims of police violence.
Ultimately, we want Every Mother’s Son to move beyond mothers, to speak to Americans first and foremost as citizens—citizens who have an obligation to one another to make policing fair as well as effective. Throughout the process of making this film, we felt we were treading a thin line. As a storytelling device, using the identity of motherhood as an organizing principle allowed us to tell intimate and moving stories of personal triumph. At the same time, we were wary of elevating motherhood to a sacred level, as though by virtue of being mothers these women were necessarily right. It just happens that, in this case, they are right.
For more information on Kelly Anderson, Tami Gold, and Every Mother’s Son, visit:
www.pbs.org/pov/pov2004/everymothersson
www.andersongoldfilms.com