Strong Island, available on Netflix, is another of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars and is one of the two that I think was somewhat widely known before the nominations came out, along with Last Men in Aleppo. Ostensibly the story of a murder that took place on Long Island in 1992 for which no one was ever charged, it’s much more the story of that murder’s effect on the victim’s family over the 23 years between when it happened and when the filmmaker, the victim’s brother*, began the project.

William Ford, Jr., was 24 in April of 1992, trying to pass the physical requirements for a job as a corrections officer, the oldest of three children of Barbara and William Sr. His girlfriend’s car had been hit by 19-year-old Mark Reilly, a white man working at a nearby garage (rumored to be a chop shop), who offered to fix the car for free if they didn’t call the cops to report the incident. Ford and his girlfriend, both African-American, agreed, but when Reilly took too long to repair the car and then swears at Ford’s mother, he returned to the garage to confront him, only to have Reilly shoot him with a .22, killing him. The grand jury returned a no true bill against Reilly, choosing to believe it was self-defense even though Ford was unarmed. Ford’s mother claims in the film that the grand jury was all white, and many members weren’t paying attention during witness testimony.

Yance (pronounced “YAN-see”), the middle child in the family, directed this documentary and appears in it frequently along with his* younger sister, his brother’s best friend (who was there when the murder occurred), his mother, and a good college friend of William Jr.’s. Not appearing, however, are anyone connected with the investigation; the ADA at the time declines to comment at all, even on the phone, while the investigating officer does comment in a recorded interview but does not appear. Neither Reilly nor the other white man at the garage that night appear, and Ford himself has been very clear that he does not want to give Reilly any “space” in the film. The murder is described, but it is an inflection point in the broader story, not a mystery to be solved. The reveal, such as it is, is minor to the viewers but major to Yance.

* Yance Ford identifies as queer in the film, but is referred to everywhere within the film as a daughter, a sister, etc. Apparently since filming ended, he has come out as trans, and most subsequent media coverage uses male pronouns (without, from what I can see, acknowledging the disparity). I’m just following their lead, but I may be wrong.

It is, therefore, a somewhat frustrating documentary, because the topic is so insular. A happy nuclear family was blown up by the murder of their son and oldest child, after which grief starts to tear apart the fabric holding them together. The father dies not long after the murder, long enough ago that he’s only in the film on video once, in archival footage. But their grief is quiet and private, and I didn’t get an emotional connection to the tragedy the way I think Yance might have intended. Their loss is huge, but William, Jr., is a figurative ghost in the film. And the racial aspects, while undeniable – if you don’t think a black man would have been indicted for the same crime with a white victim, I don’t know what to tell you – are also somewhat academic here. There’s nothing here to prove racial bias in the investigation or grand jury proceedings. Instead, Strong Island feels a bit like reading someone else’s diary – like I’m intruding on the grief of a family I don’t even know, and the cascading tragedies of the story are too distant to get the emotional response the writer would have had himself.

That said, it wouldn’t shock me in the least if this won the Oscar, given the racial politics of the film and high profile right now of Black Lives Matter and similar movements. It’s not the best documentary this year, but its subject matter might resonate more with voters than topics like Syria, doping, or the financial crisis.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, a documentary by Steve James (Hoop Dreams) that originally aired on PBS’s Frontline, earned one of the five nominations for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars. The film follows Abacus, the only bank to face criminal prosecution in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis, through the subsequent trial, largely from the perspective of the Sung family, who founded and still run the small neighborhood bank, based in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The resulting picture is one of politically-motivated prosecution of a non-white institution, of whom the overly ambitious Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., could make an example, while getting himself in front of the cameras. You can stream the film for free on PBS’s site, or via Amazon Prime.

Abacus Federal Savings Bank discovered in 2010-11 that one of its loan officers had submitted several loan applications with false information – such as forged employment info or inflated income claims – and had skimmed money from some clients, so they reported the violations to the Office of Thrift Supervision themselves, fired the offending loan officer, and began examining other loans he’d made. Despite the self-reporting, the Manhattan DA’s office chose in 2012 to indict the bank and its officers on over 200 counts related to mortgage fraud, including grand larceny, threatening the group with jail time, fines, and the potential closure of the bank. The Sung family, who founded the bank in 1984, chose to fight all charges; one of their daughters quit her job in the DA’s office and went to work on her family’s defense. Their defense included evidence that the offending loan officers had taken steps to hide their misdeeds from executives, that the loans in question still performed, and that their decision to report themselves showed they were not engaged in any systematic attempt to defraud Fannie Mae, which purchased many of the loans in question.

The Sungs are the stars of Abacus, of course, and their dismay and indignation power the film. It’s clear from the start that the family members involved in the bank saw no choice but to fight the charges, recognizing that even a generous plea agreement might ruin the company, and in the film they repeatedly emphasize what the bank means to the Chinese community in which it operates. Tom Sung, a co-founder of the bank and the family patriarch, recounts the difficulty Chinese entrepreneurs would have in obtaining loans from white-owned banks that were perfectly happy to take those same customers’ deposits. Along with community activist Don Lee (who has a politician’s coiffure) and several reporters who covered the case, the Sungs describe the different norms of the Chinese business world, and how American rules that might target mortgage fraud also made it harder for immigrants to obtain such loans, even if their income was legitimate and their default rates were extremely low. (Abacus claims a 0.5% default rate on mortgages it originates; the national rate for serious delinquency reached 4.9% in 2010 and dropped to a ten-year low of 1.1% last year.)

Vance and Polly Greenberg, who served as chief of the DA’s Major Economic Crimes division from 2012 to 2015, both appear in the film to their own detriment, as they come off in the final product as vindictive and unapologetic despite evidence that they put extremely unreliable witnesses on the stand, possibly suborning perjury in the process. (The film was made before revelations that Vance declined to prosecute Harvey Weinstein for sexual assault around the time that Weinstein contributed to Vance’s campaign.) Their star witness, in particular, lied repeatedly under oath and eventually had his plea deal revoked as a result of his false testimony. It’s entirely possible that James isn’t showing enough of the prosecution’s side of the case, although given his reputation and the ultimate outcome of the trial, I am inclined to give him and the film the benefit of the doubt. At the absolute least, Vance and Greenberg failed in their duty to do sufficient due diligence on their key witnesses, and that opens them up to charges of malicious, racially-motivated prosecution. Vance Jr. was unopposed in the November election, which is too bad, as Abacus would make a fine campaign film for anyone running against him.

I’ve seen three of the five nominees for this category now, with Netflix’s Strong Island downloaded for my next flight, and Faces Places due out on DVD at least on March 6th (after the awards … this is so stupid; if you’re nominated and can’t get into theaters, put it out to stream right away, I am trying to give you my money). Abacus is the best made of the three documentaries I’ve seen, but lacks the emotional punch of Last Men in Aleppo or the holy-crap aspects of the more timely Icarus. FiveThirtyEight’s Walt Hickey has pointed out that this year’s slate of nominees is extremely weird anyway.