Ameena Matthews shows no fear of entering the fray. And in the doggedly observant and intimate documentary “The Interrupters,” the headscarf-clad Muslim woman and former gang enforcer does it day in, day out, most often in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.
Directed by Steve James and co- created with author Alex Kotlowitz, “The Interrupters” follows Matthews and two other members of CeaseFire — a Chicago-based anti-violence organization — as they try to douse heated embers before they become conflagrations of retaliation.
So this is what the chaos that Matthews braves can look like: A teen gets some teeth knocked out in a brawl in front of the local CeaseFire office. Matthews and her colleagues head onto the sidewalk. Here comes the boy’s sister, with a will to avenge his honor. With a butcher knife. With a little girl and a clamoring clique in tow. Someone picks up a concrete block. The fray.
“We identified Ameena immediately. She was such an obvious choice,” says James of his real-life star. “Ameena’s one of two women doing this work. She’s Jeff Fort’s daughter. You’d have to be brain- dead to not feature her.”
(Fort was the head of Chicago’s Black P. Stone Nation gang and is serving a life sentence at the federal Supermax facility in Florence for conspiracy to commit an act of domestic terrorism.)
Best known for the Oscar-nominated basketball documentary “Hoop Dreams” (1994), James will be at the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax on Thursday for a Q&A after a 7 p.m. screening of “The Interrupters.”
The movie follows Matthews, Ricardo “Cobe” Williams and Eddie Bocanegra over the course of 2009. That proved a particularly brutal year for people living in Chicago’s economically bled enclaves. Among the homicides to make national news that year was the beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert. The cellphone video of his murder went viral.
In a film spent in the compelling if exhausting company of gang-bangers and hotheads (some reformed and others nearly intractable), the most sympathetic figure remains Derrion Albert’s mother, Anjanette.
Matthews, herself a mother, becomes Albert’s rock as she begins the rending task of laying her son to rest. “The Interrupters” is rife with makeshift corner memorials and open-casket funerals where too- young friends carry the coffins of the too-young victims.
If Matthews’ star turn was destined, the participation of Williams and Bocanegra was an act of discovery, says the director. While James and Kotlowitz had the support of CeaseFire honchos Tio Hardiman (a former hustler) and Dr. Gary Slutkin (an epidemiologist), their pitch for cooperation was often met with silence.
“Not many guys called,” recalls James. Cobe Williams did. Matthews may be the movie’s undaunted street preacher. But Williams is its cuddly bear. Though his 12 years in prison suggest he’s more grizzly than panda. Williams has got an easy laugh and fresh life in the suburbs with his wife, a nurse in a trauma unit. “He just had a knack for getting us in situations and a knack for getting people to cooperate and trust him. So he really emerged,” says the director. “He found us.”
James and Kotlowitz knew, too, they wanted to follow a Latino interrupter. But, the soft-spoken Bocanegra wasn’t their first choice.
“He was relatively new to the table,” says the filmmaker. “He was one of the younger interrupters and the guy who’d only been out of prison two years.”
He was also a convicted murderer. “He’d committed the ultimate act of violence. But his thoughtfulness and the fact he’s still wrestling with what he’d done, we thought that was really compelling,” says James.
It is. “The Interrupters” isn’t simply about its street heroes putting the brakes on cycles of violence. It’s a film that demands audiences lay aside their own incendiary ideas about crime in an effort to grapple with the hurt, the legacies of brutality and unacceptable conditions that have implications for us all.
