Description:
The four young men were star athletes in Shenandoah, a hardscrabble Pennsylvania town where high school football had provided one of the few bright spots since the coal mines shut down.
Luis Ramirez, a Mexican farmhand, was part of a new wave of immigrants that had settled in Shenandoah and found work on farms and in factories.
In July 2008, the four football players attacked Mr. Ramirez in a dark playground. Mr. Ramirez died soon after, and the four boys were charged with murder. The killing split the town in two, threatening Shenandoah’s self-image as an all-American hamlet, and staining the Blue Devils football team,
The four young men were star athletes in Shenandoah, a hardscrabble Pennsylvania town where high school football had provided one of the few bright spots since the coal mines shut down.
Luis Ramirez, a Mexican farmhand, was part of a new wave of immigrants that had settled in Shenandoah and found work on farms and in factories.
In July 2008, the four football players attacked Mr. Ramirez in a dark playground. Mr. Ramirez died soon after, and the four boys were charged with murder. The killing split the town in two, threatening Shenandoah’s self-image as an all-American hamlet, and staining the Blue Devils football team, revered by toddlers and grandparents alike.
It was a tragedy that touched upon several great national themes — the dislocation wrought by fading industry, the turmoil of immigration, the endurance of sports — and David C. Turnley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, was there to grapple with them all. He turned the story of the murder and how it shook the town into “Shenandoah,” a wrenching documentary that he shot, directed and produced.
“It was just an amazing opportunity to try and understand just where we’re at in this country today,” he said. “The proverbial American melting pot had never exactly melted in Shenandoah. It had always been a boiling pot.”
Mr. Turnley spent four years burrowing into the lives of people on all sides of the story, whether the burly football players who participated in the attack, their parents who struggled to understand it, or Mr. Ramirez’s family both in Shenandoah and in Mexico.
Mr. Turnley has worked in some 75 countries, covering the biggest stories of the past 35 years — apartheid in South Africa, the war in Bosnia, the fall of the Berlin Wall. But as a native of Fort Wayne, Ind., an industrial town that knows hard times, he calls “Shenandoah” the most personal work of his career.
“This was a coming-home story for me,” he said. “Of all the world conflict and stories I’ve covered, I’m not sure that I’ve covered such acutely intense human drama in one small town.”
The film weaves the football team’s struggles on the field with scenes of tense anti-immigrant protests, trial preparation and quiet, confessional interviews on darkened porches. In the months after the murder, Shenandoah, called Shen’doh by the locals, becomes a national flash point as immigration advocates come to town, television cameras in tow, demanding justice.
But the film also steps back to explore the larger story of Shenandoah’s rise and fall. Old-timers looking out on deserted streets describe a lost world where everyone had work and knew one another’s families. Now, the coal mines are closed, unemployment is high and some neighbors speak only Spanish.
The conditions may be ripe for resentment, but it is especially striking to see the tension in Shenandoah, which celebrates the generations of European immigrants that made the town vibrant.
Mr. Turnley is a photographer’s photographer: “Once you’ve done what we do, it becomes your identity, and it’s in our blood,” he says. The movie is filled with the stuff of dramatic photographs: the empty trays of a too-quiet doughnut store; the trophies and jerseys decorating a childhood bedroom. But filmmaking has allowed him to add another layer to his work.
“I’m making images, always, but I’m also engaging people in conversation, and I’m trying to get to know not only what I experience in terms of what I see, but also tapping into the hearts and minds of people,” said Mr. Turnley, who has made two previous films.
He spent months talking to Brian Scully, who was charged in the attack and emerges as the film’s most compelling character. Mr. Scully was a football idol who testified against his friends and finds a redemption of sorts in, of all things, musical theater.
Many of the most pointed moments in “Shenandoah” show Mr. Scully trying to understand his responsibility for the murder. “We needed to get in trouble for this,” he says in the film. His voice softens as he continues: “I started to think about Luis as a person.”
Mr. Turnley hopes to show “Shenandoah” at a film festival in the coming months. There are no plans yet for a wider distribution, but he is eager for the world to see his work.
“The human drama of the story kept unraveling in ways start to finish that you never would have imagined,” he said.
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