On Aug. 23, 1989, a Black teenager named Yusuf K. Hawkins was fatally shot in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, after being surrounded by a group of white youths, an incident of race-related violence that became a lightning rod in New York and beyond. In the wake of George Floyd protests, the documentary “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” could scarcely be timelier.
Part of the director Muta’Ali’s strategy is to center Hawkins’s friends and family, whose stories got lost in the political din. The Rev. Al Sharpton organized marches; for the mayoral candidates in the 1989 primary, the killing became a talking point. But the competing agendas surrounding the case would prevent anyone from making a cohesive Hawkins documentary, and “Storm Over Brooklyn” never settles on a satisfying point of view.
Muta’Ali illustrates the geography of the killing with aerial shots of the neighborhood streets. Joseph Fama, still in prison after a conviction for second-degree murder, asserts his innocence in an interview, and Muta’Ali supplies a video clip in which a witness appears to recant testimony that implicated him — but the judge didn’t allow the new account. Was the judge right or wrong? The film doesn’t provide enough information. Shortly after that video, Muta’Ali shows Hawkins’s friend Christopher Graham saying that Fama looked like he had “no sense of remorse at all” in the courtroom, and leaves the disconnect to hang in the air.
“Storm Over Brooklyn” is more effective when Hawkins’s mother, Diane, talks about her emotional devastation and feeling like she was on “another planet” during that period, or when one of Hawkins’s friends, Luther Sylvester, remembers the atmosphere at school in the tragedy’s aftermath.
Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on HBO Max.
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‘Storm Over Brooklyn’ Review: A Flash Point of Racial Violence - The New York Times
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