Films on police victims capture mothers’ pain
Millions have seen the viral videos of police shootings, but the stories don’t end with a death in the street. This is what happens later: A woman sits in a cemetery, trimming the grass around her son’s gravestone, pulling and snipping the blades to get them shorter, neater, perfect.
The scene showing Gwen Woods in anguish opens a six-minute documentary made by Bay Area filmmakers, “Happy Birthday Mario Woods,” about the 26-year-old black man whose Dec. 2 killing by five officers in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood after a reported stabbing fueled community outrage and a push for reforms in the city police force.
None of that matters to Gwen Woods as she stares down at her son’s name on the marble marker.
“The first time I came here,” she says, “I
remember thinking if I really wanted to just hug my child, if I just kind of started just digging in to get down to the coffin, he’s right under here.”
The documentary is the third in a series of short films marking the birthdays of men shot and killed by police, men whose names have become social media hashtags. The first two documented the birthdays of Philando Castile, a Minnesota man killed in July during a traffic stop, and Oscar Grant, who was shot and killed at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2009.
Amid a national debate about how to reduce police killings — one dominated by raw, often jarring video of fatal encounters — the filmmakers wanted to do something different and add a new perspective. They decided to focus on the victims’ birthdays because the occasion is associated with celebrating life and hope for the future, marking a “completed trip around the sun,” said producer Malcolm Pullinger.
“We associate those names with a very violent incident,” said director Mohammad Gorjestani. “All of a sudden we're being asked to associate that name with a different tone.”
They wanted to show that even when the TV news trucks leave and the headlines change, the families and friends have not moved on. “We really wanted to say this continues,” Gorjestani said. “There is a quiet grief that is profound, the kind of grief that sticks to your bones.”
The “Happy Birthday” series was created by Even/Odds Films, a San Francisco studio and production company founded by Gorjestani and Pullinger. Their documentaries offer a portrait of people killed by police through the grief displayed by family and friends. There are no angry shouts for justice in the films or violent protest clashes with police. It’s more hushed mourning and tears.
“We need this (conversation) to be sustained,” Gorjestani said. “We need to make these things that people feel.”
The killing of Woods is still under investigation, while a U.S. Department of Justice review of the San Francisco Police Department spurred by the shooting is continuing.
Police have said five officers who surrounded and then fired on Woods did their best while trying to subdue a stabbing suspect who still had the knife and refused to comply with commands even after being hit with pepper spray and beanbag rounds.
But footage of the incident captured by a witness showed one officer stepping in front of Woods as he shuffled slowly along a wall, with the gunfire coming moments later, even though Woods — who had drugs in his system and suffered from psychiatric issues, according to his family — did not appear to directly threaten anyone with the knife.
“Happy Birthday Mario Woods” depicts Gwen Woods on her son’s July 22 birthday, the camera following her to a community memorial service and later to her home, with family and friends blowing out the candles on her son’s birthday cake for him. But the most intimate moments come at Mario Woods’ burial site, which his mother is compelled to visit with gardening tools.
“There’s this voice, ‘Go keep that headstone clean,’ ” Gwen Woods said in an interview with The Chronicle. “There’s the odd insanity to it.” Tidying the grave is akin to brushing your child’s hair, she said, straightening his collar or picking lint off his shirt. It’s a mother fretting over her son, “like a mom does.”
“When I'm there I feel that,” she said.
“Her emotion is so raw,” said Ephraim Walker, the executive producer on the project. “That day was really hard for me emotionally, but I feel like in the process of doing this film Gwen healed a little bit. She smiled.”
Gwen Woods said she hopes those who see the film will know her son wasn’t a one-dimensional figure — neither a hashtag nor the sum of the transgressions on his rap sheet. Perhaps Mario didn’t look good on paper, his mother said, but he didn’t deserve to be killed.
She had wanted to see him grow up and get past the troubling times, to “get through the Proverb years and onto the wisdom years,” she said. “I think even in the midst of all this, we have to represent the victims that don’t look great on paperwork. He was more than that paperwork.”
“There is a quiet grief that is profound, the kind of grief that sticks to your bones.” Mohammad Gorjestani, “Happy Birthday” series director, on the films’ message