"On Sept. 22, 1975, 45-year-old Sara Jane Moore fired two bullets at then-President Gerald Ford. They were in San Francisco, outside a hotel. Moore missed her first shot, but seeing an opportunity, took another. She missed that one, too. An ex-Marine named Oliver Sipple, who was behind her in the crowd, tackled Moore before she could try for a third. "I said, the bitch has got a gun," he later recounted."
"Forty years later, after serving 32 years of her life sentence in federal prison and being released on parole, a CNN journalist asked Moore, "What drove you to try to assassinate President Ford?" The same question is at the heart of Robinson Devor's documentary Suburban Fury, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2024 and is slated for a wider theatrical release this year."
"Suburban Fury opens with a title card informing us that Moore agreed to participate on the condition that no other interviews were conducted. From the first, we are trapped in her claustrophobic perspective, on which Devor leans to evoke the atmosphere of paranoia that accompanies Moore's narration. He shoots her through panes of glass, alone in the backseat of a car, in an empty living room."
Robinson Devor's Suburban Fury centers on interviews with Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975. Moore served 32 years in federal prison, was released on parole, and died at 95. The project proceeds under Moore's condition that no other interviews be conducted, locking the perspective tightly to her claustrophobic narration. The filmmaker employs framed compositions, glass panes, and empty domestic spaces to evoke political paranoia and borrows visual cues from Alan J. Pakula's paranoia thrillers. The film revisits the assassination site and interrogates Moore's state of mind, political beliefs, personal history, and sense of purpose.
Read at Defector
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