A journalism grad student presents his own take on the Chauncey Bailey murder.
By Rachel Swan
April 29, 2009
Zachary Stauffer's documentary A Day Late in Oakland opens with a
commercial kitchen getting destroyed: Men in hard hats hammer into a
wall and dismantle a large oven while, offscreen, an architect makes
plans for a new apartment upstairs. The shots don't immediately
suggest that this is a film about a murder, or that the building was
the place where members of Your Black Muslim Bakery allegedly
conspired to kill Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey in August of
2007, shortly after Bailey began investigating the business' spotty
financial history. Then, a couple of minutes into the first sequence,
Stauffer shows the construction workers disassembling a giant mixer
that had been used to make breads and cakes with "all natural
ingredients." His use of the mixer as a framing device and a rather
cryptic symbol of the bakery's demise gives some indication as to
how he plans to treat the subject matter. His film is cautious, and
about as balanced as it could be given his scant access to relatives
and associates of bakery founder Yusef Bey. But it's also harrowing.
Stauffer launched his career making broadcast documentaries about
land use and urban sprawl. He learned about the slaying of Bailey
during a summer internship with Al Jazeera English in Washington, DC,
and decided to pursue it as his master's thesis at UC Berkeley's
Graduate School of Journalism. By October, he was knee-deep in the
story, having contacted Bailey's family and interviewed several local
journalists including reporters from the Chauncey Bailey Project
and former East Bay Express writer Chris Thompson, who first
documented the nefarious side of Yusef Bey's empire in 2002. He also
interviewed former bakery business consultant Joe Debro and community
activist Eddie Abrams, who both spoke positively about Your Black
Muslim Bakery as an institution.
A Day Late in Oakland is mostly an archival film, but it's well paced
and dramatic. Stauffer takes pains to humanize his subjects in a
short amount of time (just under half an hour). Not surprisingly, the
filmmaker had some unsettling moments during his nine-month
production process. Most perturbing was when Stauffer explored the
bakery's upstairs apartment, right as the downstairs was getting torn
down. There he found an article by Bailey tacked to one of the
bedroom walls. It praised the bakery's school program and everything
the organization had done for African Americans in Oakland. "This was
months after the murder, and I don't think some worker who was just
there to do construction and demolition duties would just tack that
up on the wall it was probably already there," Stauffer surmised.
"The fact that it was hanging there as someone was talking about how
to kill this guy was another haunting reality of the story."
--
A Day Late in Oakland screens Saturday, May 2 (3:30 p.m.), and
Thursday, May 7 (2:30 p.m.), at San Francisco's Sundance Kabuki
Cinema (1881 Post St.). $10-$12.50. ADayLateinOakland.com
.
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