Milwaukee’s Erik Ljung is putting the finishing touches on his documentary about the Hamilton family’s heartbreaking experience
Erik Ljung’s already made a name for himself with a pair of hard-hitting documentary shorts on police violence and racial disparities. But, if you ask Ljung, headline-grabbing pieces for VICE and The New York Times are just a means to an end.
For the better part of the last two years, the Milwaukee-area director has been tirelessly working on a feature-length film. His goal? To present a personal, vérité-styled look at the present-day lives of Dontre Hamilton’s family. Hamilton was shot 14 times in April 2014 by Milwaukee police officer Christopher Manney. Although Manney was subsequently fired, the district attorney elected not to press charges.
Ljung has accrued over 300 hours of footage and was a Brico Forward Fund recipient in 2015. Ljung told me that a finished version wouldn’t be ready until early 2017, but he’s set to present an assembly cut at Kartemquin Labs next week. Earlier this week, he spoke with me over the phone about his yet-to-be-titled documentary.
Social consciousness and human rights issues have shaped what you’re doing in film. Which of those interests came first, though?
When I started this project, Black Lives Matter wasn’t a thing. The Dontre Hamilton case happened before Mike Brown, and I was following and doing research on the case before [the Brown case] happened. The first big rally the Hamilton family held was in mid-Aug 2014. That’s really when I went out and filmed for the first time, for the big rally that the family did.
Social justice is always something I’ve been interested in following, but the first time I did any film projects related to social justice was a piece I DP’ed and helped produce for VICE News on the death of Corey Stingley. Corey was a black kid in a white neighborhood here in West Allis. He got caught trying to steal a bottle of booze. He returned it but was apprehended by four customers who were all white men. He was choked out and killed, and no charges were filed against the four involved. That was a particularly egregious case and I can’t help but think that if it were a white kid and four black guys that choked him out I just can’t see how there wouldn’t be any charges. We did a story on the case and followed Corey’s father.
With the Dontre Hamilton case, a lot of times when it involves the police, the police department has a head start and are able to set the narrative, and once that narrative is out in public, it’s hard to change it. Really, this film is following what it’s like for a family involved in one of these cases, to try to see through their viewpoint when forced to be political and in front of the media.
This documentary feature sounds like a natural progression from your other pieces then.
Those other pieces were really just ways for me to earn a little bit of income so I could stay focused on this project. I get hired to do DP work and I’m usually on the road 75% of the time. The intent was always to do this feature-length film first.
Are you following anything outside of the Hamilton family’s experiences?
The narrative backbone follows the family’s progression and how the outside investigation unfolds in this case, but it’s also examining the Michael Bell Law on the periphery. Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites, but Michael Bell went through this with his son, too — a blonde hair, blue-eyed kid in Kenosha. There’s a little back-and-forth there, too.
It seems like every police department is looking at reform because there’s so much scrutiny. Milwaukee is an interesting case study because it had the first shooting to fall under an outside investigation. And there are mental health issues to this case. We’re increasingly seeing police departments respond to non-emergency mental health-related calls and with increasingly tragic results. It’s estimated that 1,200 people per year are killed by police and nearly a quarter of those have been diagnosed with a mental illness. All Milwaukee officers now have to undergo 40 hours of mental health training. They have a mental health unit, and they’re trying to pair an officer with a mental health clinician to respond to calls. Milwaukee police officers have to wear body cameras now. The narrative backbone is following the family, but it’s touching on a bunch of stuff, too.
Stylistically, your short-form pieces play like news segments because that’s exactly what they are. But how much will you rely on those news-friendly techniques like voice-over in this?
There will absolutely be no voice-over. We have an assembly cut now that’s between four and five hours and right now, there’s a mix of talking heads. We interviewed the district attorney that made the final charges decision in this case. We sat down with the police chief and then interviewed some of the Hamilton family members as well. But we’re also looking at other things we can do to make those pieces more interesting. We might redo some interviews in a more stylized way, but we’re going to try and use as little interview footage as possible. There’s a lot of vérité footage. The vérité scenes are coming together nicely, and we’re relying on that as much as possible.
Apart from wrapping your mind around 12.5 days of footage, what have some challenges been over the last two years?
When you’re dealing with a family who is clearly at the worst time in their lives, there may be material you need to tell the story but in reality none of that matters because this is real life. You need to learn to respect boundaries and not push too hard. I talked with the family about what I was trying to do and why theirs is an important story to tell, but there are times when they want to be left alone. It’s been challenging from a film standpoint, but from a human standpoint, you have to respect that. They’ve given me so much time in the last two years and I’m incredibly thankful for them letting me into their lives because I know it’s not the most fun experience. Having me around is a little more intrusive than a news camera.
Was there a specific instance where you as a storyteller had to reassess your proximity to this family, to respect the loss of life in your subject?
The day the district attorney’s decision came down, I filmed with the family for a while and it was very emotional. Everyone went to church afterward where there was no media present and it was just me. Later that night everyone went back to the house and I just felt it was time to put the camera down. I had already pushed it so much. You can kind of sense that they’re done with the camera.
There were other times when they would straight up tell me. I was filming with [Dontre’s mother] Maria at her house during a period where she was working third shift and then sleeping for two, maybe three hours before waking up for an activism thing or to work on the case. So there were months where she was barely getting any sleep, and sometimes my presence and filming her became an annoyance and she would tell me to leave. But for the most part, every time I’ve asked for access or an interview they have trusted me and gone along with it. They have been very patient with the process, but when I am not actively filming with them I try to give them space.
- You can find more of Erik Ljung’s work at erikljung.tv