A reporter friend did a write up on The Throwaways doc after I presented it to the local soup kitchen here in Ithaca NY here is his write up. Carrying the Message, Not the Mess By Franklin Crawford Ira McKinley was in town briefly last month presenting “The Throwaways,” a movie he co-directed and co-produced with Bhawin Suchak, an Albany filmmaker. I caught a screening at Loaves and Fishes on a chilly April night. McKinley, a former Ithaca resident, was a controversial figure in my early days as a reporter at the Ithaca Journal. We were acquainted and spent time together here and there, usually in a running argument about race relations and politics. Through McKinley and others, I witnessed some things that opened my eyes to the entrenched racism right here in Tiny Town. McKinley was then embroiled in an abuse case with the Ithaca Police Department. City reporter Dan Fost covered that case, and I remember Ira coming into the old, unsecured newsroom to give Dan an earful. Fost trod the razor’s edge in that story, telling Ira’s side as well as the IPD’s point of view. It was a no-win job. It came down to a he said/they said story, and no one was happy with the reporter’s work—not Ira, not the cops, not the mayor. McKinley left his hometown, eventually, feeling he’d become a target and “fearing for his life,” he says. He landed in Albany, with a grudge and a drug habit that would put him in jail. “The Throwaways” is a somewhat confusing spiral of facts and storytelling that made me edgy and uncomfortable. Intuitively, I knew what it was about. The presentation left me wondering-. “Throwaways” are people in communities, black Americans in this case, who have been marginalized to the point of irrelevancy. McKinley is candid about his drug use, criminal life, homelessness and hard time in the pen. He was released from prison in about 2002 and tried to make a go of it, he says. His rap sheet made it hard to find work or public assistance. He spent months in flops and missions. Somehow he wound up in Northampton, Mass., with an idea in his head. He wanted to tell his story but enlarge it as symbolic of what is happening to urban black communities—the endless tragedies, the shootings and the poverty traps and oceanic despair that plagues poor black America. McKinley trained at a public-access TV studio, remade himself as a community activist and took his camcorder into the streets. He won a Northampton arts grant for “emerging filmmaker” and his circumstances slowly changed. McKinley does not edit himself out of confrontational scenes, especially one with the police and another at a press conference with the mayor of Albany. The former he makes no apologies about, and indeed the police seemed too eager to get the filmmaker out of the way; in the latter scene, McKinley says that his “PTSD” had got the better of him. Where the PTSD diagnosis came from is not explained. He also covers an emotional press conference with the Albany chief of police after the shooting death of a young Albany man, NahCream Moore. McKinley’s father was killed by Miami police in 1979, a story that resurfaces in the film. He is interviewed and asked about it, and it’s clear the loss smolders inside of McKinley, as well it might. I expected to see some U.S. Department of Justice data. Data that show the staggering growth of the prison-industrial complex. For instance, in 1970 there were 338,029 people incarcerated in American prisons; by 2001 that number had grown to 2,042,479. More people were put behind bars in the 1990s than in any decade previously. By 2011, 2,266,800 Americans were incarcerated. One out of three black men will be arrested by age 18; by the time they are 24, that figure jumps to 40 percent. Instead of trotting out numbers, McKinley gets next to people like Michelle Alexander, civil rights litigator and author of “The New Jim Crow,” and Van Jones, a civil rights activist, environmentalist, attorney and founder of Rebuild the Dream, a progressive movement to challenge the extremist Tea Party. Cornel West, the renowned scholar and civil rights activist, appears at Riverside Church in New York City with Alexander in a panel discussion. McKinley did his footwork, but the message of “The Throwaways” was unclear to me, and I have deep sympathies with the subject matter. I didn’t have time to stay after the film for the discussion—my bad. We met briefly a few days later. McKinley said a lot of the holes in the film were intentional. The movie is meant to jump-start discussions with the audience. He welcomes any criticism as a way to improve his work and to open up a larger dialogue, he says. Our meeting was too short. He was hopping a bus to do some work on a friend’s organic farm in Corning. It’s part of weaving his activism into the green movement, something he learned talking to Van Jones. There’s much more to “The Throwaways” than I have described here, especially the voices of young black men on the street. One young man praises Ira for his leadership and support of his community. When I contacted Fost to tell him I’d met Ira, his first words were: “I’m
Posted on: Wed, 28 May 2014 23:12:53 +0000