In 2019, 18-year-old Ty’Rese West was shot and killed by a Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin police officer named Eric Giese. Six years later, his family is still looking for justice. A new documentary called “Cycle” tracks their journey.
But “Cycle” isn’t just about Ty’Rese’s death. It’s about unpacking cycles of police violence that permeate this country, taking to task the very legal system that’s supposed to protect us.
“It’s not just a film about Ty’Rese West,” said co-director Laura Dyan Kezman. “It puts the entire system on trial for how it’s built in a way that is very hard to fight against.”
Kezman co-directed the film with William Howell. Both Racine natives, the pair met just after Ty’Rese’s death in 2019 and embarked on a six-year project to bring “Cycle” to the world. A special screening of the film will take place at the Plaza Theatre on Oct. 23, hosted by rapper Killer Mike. Ty’Rese’s mother, Monique West, and the filmmakers will also be in attendance, according to a press release. The film is scheduled to begin an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run at the Tara Theatre on Oct. 30.
Before Howell met Kezman, he thought that she would give him a few filmmaking pointers and move on. But, after watching her documentary “Invisible Lines,” which is about segregation in Milwaukee, he wanted to bring her aboard. Their partnership throughout the film – that between a Black man and a white woman – crystalized something for him about the ways in which police violence affects everyone.
“If a white cop kills a Black kid, whatever happens – these are shared experiences,” he said. “It’s not just Black people experiencing pain. There are white people like Laura who have to stand on the other side. She doesn’t deserve to feel guilt, but at the same time, she knows that she has to use her voice.”
Ahead of the screening, I spoke with Howell and Kezman about the painstaking process of making the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Will, I heard that you were born in Atlanta, but I know both of you were raised in Racine, and that you met through a mutual friend. But, I’m curious what made you both decide to work on this project together? What drew you to each other as partners to tell this particular story?
William Howell: One thing I want to make sure that I do clarify is that I was born in Racine. My mother moved us to Atlanta, Georgia, when I was three years old, and stayed there until I was about nine. So, I spent a majority of my early childhood in Atlanta, but I wasn’t born there.
Thanks for the clarification!
Howell: What really drew me to this story is that Ty’Rese’s father and I, we were very close friends in middle school. We were almost best friends. We spent every day together. From the moment that I saw Ty’Rese’s picture come down my timeline – I mean, it was just like seeing his twin. It was an instant heartbreak for me. I had never met Ty’Rese. I didn’t even know about Ty’Rese, and so it was just an instant call to action for me to get involved. Especially being a local videographer and a local rapper, somebody who had a voice and a trust with the community. Through that, I started campaigning online a lot. I was using whatever platform I could find. Honestly, I prayed a lot. I just prayed that God would put somebody into my life who could teach me filmmaking and who could help me tell this story.
Just through the power of prayer, I was contacted by my business partner Jesse Booker, and he had a friend named Amanda Thaxton, which is also Laura’s friend. Amanda took it upon herself to connect us, because she felt as though this was a moment that would be great for both of us. Initially, Laura was really just scheduled to meet with me and give me some pointers on how to go forward with this. But from the moment that I watched her documentary – it was called “Invisible Lines,” and it’s about the segregation here in Milwaukee – I knew from that moment that she was destined to tell this story. When I got to meet with her, it was just my duty to make sure that she accepted the responsibility to tell this story.
Laura, can you talk about that from your side?
Laura Dyan Kezman: Will said it perfectly. We were introduced through a mutual friend. The first time that we met was at a coffee shop, and I was thinking that I was just going to be giving some pointers on how he could start this documentary on his own. I was interested to hear more of the story itself, because I’m also born and raised in Racine. This is also a hometown story for me. Will started unpacking the details of the case that never made the headlines, that were percolating among the community in Racine but were receiving zero media attention – and at that point, the district attorney had just decided to not charge the officer, so this was very fresh, when he and I were talking.
It turned into a three-hour conversation where I just had so many questions about the case itself. A side note detail is that the night of the shooting, the night that Ty’Rese was killed, me and the friend that introduced Will and I – being from Racine, we happened to be out grabbing a drink together that night, and we drove past the crime scene unknowingly. Ever since that night, the news never even reached Milwaukee. I live in Milwaukee now; that’s 30 minutes north of Racine. There was just a silence around this gruesome event that had happened, and this tragedy. He was only 18. He was on a bike. The details, if you just start unpacking it, were just mind-blowing … We just started asking questions – this is before COVID hit in 2020. We ended up doing our first round of interviews for the documentary within a few weeks after that first conversation. It happened very quickly.
When was that? 2019?
Kezman: Ty’Rese was killed in June of 2019. Will and I met for the first time – it was like, October or November of 2019, and then we started filming in December of 2019.
Will, I was listening to a podcast that you guys were on, and you mentioned feeling like you were going viral when you were talking about Ty’Rese, and feeling like you were having some sort of reach. And then, realizing that nobody outside of this very specific sphere knew the details of what had happened. That’s something I think about a lot, with how much we’re inundated with daily, how quickly tragedies and news passes us by. Now you guys have this documentary, and I’m curious how you think about that now – how you think about trying to keep this story in front of people’s eyes, and make sure they don’t forget.
Howell: When Laura and I started, if we sat down and Laura told me, “Hey Will, this is gonna take six years,” I would have politely walked out of the coffeeshop.
Kezman: [Laughs]
Howell: But the entire time, all of us – everybody who was involved with this film, anybody who knows Laura – everybody expected a good film, because we all know that Laura is good. She is great at what she does. But nobody expected her to make a cultural phenomenon.
This film, to me, will last for generations. This is our first documentary, as Black culture, that will last like a “Boyz n the Hood,” a “New Jack City,” a “Juice” – the films that mean everything to us. For me, I’m no longer in a place where I’m not patient. I’m very patient with this process. We are preparing ourselves for a very slow burn, because we want ownership. The same fight that we’re putting up for “Cycle” to fight against this system, we’re realizing that the same kind of system exists within the film industry. So we have to be patient with this message. We have to be patient with Ty’Rese’s story. We can’t bring Ty’Rese back, but we can create change with this moment. We can create change with this film that Laura took so much time to create and to care for Black culture. We can also open up the door for so much healing – for Black and white people to look at what me and Laura were able to do, the things we were able to fight through. Because it wasn’t easy. We had to break many cycles within ourselves just to get to this point. But more than anything, I learned that this is a generational timepiece. It is supposed to take time. It will transcend generations, and I’m not afraid of what takes time. I’m more afraid of what time takes. So this is perfect for us.
You mentioned the cycles you had to break and the difficulty of making something like this. I’m sure you got pushback over the course of making this from the powers that be – the police departments, or whoever it might be. And I’m sure there were multiple difficult things with a story like this, but you mentioned it took six years – what were the most frustrating moments for both of you in making this?
Kezman: I think it was very multi-layered. It started with a lot of anger surrounding questions of injustice that we just did not understand. My background is in journalism. I knew what questions to ask. We ended up partnering with the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism in the reporting of this story. Through the layers that we ended up unpeeling – specifically surrounding the way, systematically, that this unfolded in Racine, Wisconsin – but really, it kind of peels away the larger story of how cases like this operate and are processed in small communities across the country when national eyes are not on it. Then you start providing the context for the bigger question of how something like this can happen in perpetuity when individual police precincts across the country all operate autonomously, for example.
Part of the length and the problems that we encountered along the way were, yes, of course systematic. The open records requests alone took almost a year to fulfill, and they were fulfilled partially. One thing that did not make the film is that we actually sued the Mount Pleasant Police Department and the Racine Police Department for violating FOIA law, because they were not responding within the required time limit that they needed to for response. And when they did give us information, a lot of it was redacted, or incomplete.
The other aspect of it, of course, was emotional and personal for Will and I. We’re, I would dare to say, much more evolved versions of ourselves now than we were when we started this process, and that’s because of the time that it had to take. I think that one thing that always bonded Will and I from the beginning was this almost spiritual conviction of telling this story. There was never a moment in the process of making it for me where I doubted the purpose in what this was, and what this would build to, even though I had no idea what that would look like. And Will – and of course, he can speak to this more himself – but for him, it’s as personal as it gets. I mean, his uncle was the police chief. This is his family and his community that he’s navigating the dynamic of as being the face of this project that they all knew was happening … There was a lot on the line for Will, and he put himself in this very precarious position to be the voice for this innocent kid that was killed all this time ago – and all of the political risks that come with that, with his uncle being the police chief.
For Will and I to be in the place where we are now, both emotionally, spiritually, but also just the time that it took for us to uncover what the cycle really is. You know, we thought going into it that we were going to see Eric Giese on trial – that we were going to uncover the thing that was going to put him behind bars, and we were going to get the justice that we felt like [Ty’Rese’s mother] Monique West deserved. The slow, agonizing process of the legal system when it comes to civil cases even, is a hidden part of the cycle that never gets talked about. What are the family’s options, really, at the end of the day? [For Monique], the option for justice as it’s defined in the traditional sense was never even an option. But she wasn’t told that. We didn’t know that. It was this slow uncovering of the parts of the cycle that are really the thing that keeps it going and keeps us stuck in this echo chamber of when a tragedy like this happens. It becomes a hashtag when there’s evidence and there’s attention, and then it dies, and there’s silence surrounding it. We see it happen all the time.
There’s a moment in the documentary where one of the defense lawyers says something about how it’s a small percentage of police officers who do this sort of thing. But from my perspective, it feels like it’s more of a cultural problem. I know it’s a heady question, but I’m curious if either of you have thoughts about how you break a cycle like that, having worked on this for six years and been so close to this story.
Howell: I think that’s where “Cycle” as a film is the most powerful asset that we have, because it has the chance to work behind the scenes. It has the chance to work within the crevices. If you can get a cop who solo, by himself, is willing to watch that film to challenge himself – that’s the only way that I think that we have a chance to break those kinds of cycles. Where they step out independently in themselves. That’s where me and Laura learned along the way. We would not be able to complete this film if we did not actually love each other. If we didn’t learn to work together and fight through this thing to tell one truth. No matter how either of us saw Ty’Rese’s story, or how we see the world, we have to learn that it’s a shared experience. That’s the way that we had to learn to live and see this.
So for me, when you’re looking at just trying to break cycles, that’s what we learned more than anything. You’ve got to start with breaking those cycles within yourself. I wanted Eric Giese punished. I wanted all of these things. But more than anything, what I learned is that I was angry. It was fine at first, because my anger took us through the first 90 days … But my anger would never carry us through a six-year process of trying to complete something. At a certain point, my anger was becoming more of a nuisance than an asset. There came a certain point in my life where I had to start to break cycles. I can’t become the same monster that Eric Giese is because I’m so angry that I want justice.
God was really using this process to not just break cycles within the system, or the things that we want to see happen on a larger scale, but within us. I think that’s exactly where it has to start if we want to see any change within the police, the system, the DAs, the judges. We have to start with the generation that’s next. They have to be able to look. They have to be able to have proof. “Cycle” is proof of concept. It is proof of what is happening, and they can look at that, and nobody can run from it. Everybody has to reason with it, because it is truth, and it is undeniably the truth. I think that when they sit with that and they’re able to digest that, and you have proof that people can work together like Laura and Will, and it becomes contagious to do so – I think that that’s where we have to start.
One thing I respected about this documentary is that it hit upon something I think is often missed in these conversations. There’s a section where you talk about some of Ty’Rese’s priors, and an incident with a stolen car leading up to the time he was killed. Someone in the documentary mentions the fact that the police officer wouldn’t have known about any of those, so they didn’t factor into his decision-making. But you also hit on that, even besides that, it doesn’t matter that he had priors. That doesn’t make it okay. I think that’s a discussion point that often gets left out. You also talk about his family and his girlfriend, and use archival footage of him. I wondered if you could talk about trying to present Ty’Rese to the audience as he was.
Kezman: It was absolutely necessary for us to paint the fullest possible picture of not just who Ty’Rese was, but the context of this particular case that was left out of every news article locally that was written about it. That, in and of itself, was a way of pinpointing how the media itself and the narrative that gets created is part of the cycle as well. Who controls the narrative, for it to go from the crime scene, where the offending officer is literally the only witness, and the only narrative. And then he controls his own crime scene, and then that police report is converted into the press release that reaches the local outlets, that then gets converted into the first articles that people read about it, before there is any independent investigation or questions that are able to be raised of whether or not [Ty’Rese] even had a gun on the scene.
We have Ty’Rese’s mentor saying on camera, when an officer does something wrong, that never reaches the press. But as soon as a young Black kid gets killed, everyone wants to find a reason for why he’s dead. I feel like that was just said so appropriately, because that’s what happens all the time. That was a way of us – not overtly accusing or criticizing, saying that the media is at fault for this or that – but [making] a really important and subtle point … of how powerful, especially local media is in these cases.
I used to cover a city desk, and police press releases can be bonkers. They make no sense, they have so little information.
Kezman: They make no sense! And they’re reported on verbatim. Like, verbatim. It’s insane.
It’s a hard problem to fix, especially in an age when people want information so quickly. News organizations are in a fight to get everything out first, and that’s not always in the best interest of accuracy.
Howell: We see that right now, with Nolan Wells. Even though he wasn’t killed by the police, me and Laura, we’ve been paying so much attention. In Ty’Rese’s case, you had 90 days that went by, and maybe four or five months before Laura was even involved. To watch her come get involved and to scrape up all these facts, and go through all of the rumors and the things that weren’t true – it was so crazy. So, to watch [Nolan’s] case happen and to see what you consider facts flying from here to there … It’s kind of horrendous to watch, when you know what you have in “Cycle,” and you want it to be in the hands of the culture for this reason. So when something happens to a family like Nolan Wells’ family, they have a guide. They have something that they can lean on of experience, where they’re not just lost in the process that happens. Like Laura said, it’s a grueling process, and regardless of what anybody thinks, it’s going to take years. It is meant to take years. Being in the age of information, where everything flows so freely, having somebody like Laura who can go and really find the facts, and be willing to push boundaries – that’s the reason why “Cycle” is so vital to me right now in this day and time.
