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Date: Monday, October 16, 2017
Time: 7pm
Location: Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, MA
Director(s): Yance Ford
Film Details: 107 minutes, 2016, USA/Denmark, color, DCP
Film Website | Trailer | Facebook Event | Tickets
Winner of U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Official Selection at the 2017 Berlinale.
Director Yance Ford will attend in person for Q&A with filmmaker Robb Moss, who is Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard College and Creative Advisor at the Sundance Doc Edit Labs.
About the Film:
Strong Island chronicles the arc of a family across history, geography and tragedy – from the racial segregation of the Jim Crow South to the promise of New York City; from the presumed safety of middle class suburbs, to the maelstrom of an unexpected, violent death. It is the story of the Ford family: Barbara Dunmore, William Ford and their three children and how their lives were shaped by the enduring shadow of race in America. A deeply intimate and meditative film, Strong Island asks what one can do when the grief of loss is entwined with historical injustice, and how one grapples with the complicity of silence, which can bind a family in an imitation of life, and a nation with a false sense of justice.
“Footage here isn’t happened upon, it isn’t automatic or diaristic, but rather deeply, perhaps obsessively deliberated—sincerely captured after decades of traumatized anticipation.” – Film Comment
About the Filmmaker:
Yance Ford, who is transgender, is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellowship, and was among Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2011. For ten years Ford was privileged to work as Series Producer for the PBS showcase POV and where his curatorial work helped garner more than 16 Emmy nominations. Ford is also an architectural welder, and while at Modern Art Foundry he helped assemble the sculpture “Maman” by Louise Bourgeois—the series of three spiders exhibited at Rockefeller Center, and now on permanent display at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Screens with:
The New York Times Op-Doc Short:
“A Conversation with Police on Race”
7 min | 2015 | USA | digital file
When it comes to race relations in America, there has been no shortage of rhetoric, rage and accusations – but very little discussion. THE CONVERSATION is a series of short films that serve as a platform for dialogue on the deep racial tension and polarization that exist in our communities. “A Conversation with Police on Race” is the fourth installment in the series that speaks to former officers who share their thoughts on policing and race in America.
DIRECTED & PRODUCED BY: Geeta Gandbhir / Perri Peltz
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Rudy Valdez
EDITOR: Alex Keipper
PRODUCERS: Joe Brewster / Blair Foster / Michèle Stephenson
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER: Ayana Enomoto-Hurst
THANK YOU: Jennifer Mirsky
The DocYard is an award-winning film and discussion series at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, and which also sponsors special screenings and co-presentations throughout the year. Each screening is a new experience as we connect audiences directly with filmmakers exploring the documentary form through insightful post-screening discussions.
