STRANGE FRUIT
D: Regis Trigano
Documentary Feature Competition
Race relations – or rather the complete absence of them – are at the heart of Trigano’s absorbing but overlong documentary, which examines, elliptically at times, the state of affairs in the small Floridian backwater of Belle Glade. There’s nothing remotely belle about this rural morass of crushing poverty and outright despair, though, and as Trigano’s lens probes the 2003 hanging death of a 32-year old African-American man, the possibility that things are even worse than originally presumed arises. Suffering from occasional bouts of depression (although it’s difficult to imagine who wouldn’t, given the milieu), he was found dangling from a tree in his mother’s front yard, like Billie Holiday’s grim poplar gift, and the all-white authorities promptly ruled the cause of death self-inflicted. But questions remain, chief among them how the man managed to hang himself from so precarious a branch without benefit of a chair or ladder. Trigano’s film works best when it latches on to a heavingly obese local mom who says her seven children are the pride of her life, despite the wrenching lack of promise in their shared environment. One of her boys, too, suffers from depression, and she comments that she tries to make him happy by letting him essentially do whatever he wants. Questionable familial stewardship aside, one can’t help but realize Dr. King’s dream is still fast asleep in this sorrowful township of unfulfilled promise and abandoned hopes.
This article appears in March 25 • 2005.