Central Islip native Yance Ford is the director and co-producer of the documentary Strong Island. In January 2018, Strong Island received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. 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.
Strong Island launched globally on Netflix in September 2017 and has played over 15 film festivals worldwide. It won the Special Jury Award for Storytelling at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. With his Academy Award nomination, Mr. Ford made history as the first transgender director whose film received this distinction.
Mr. Ford is a Sundance Institute Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee, and former series producer of the PBS anthology series POV. He has been featured in Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. The Root 100 recently named him among the most influential African Americans of 2017. In December the International Documentary Association presented him with their Emerging Filmmaker Award.
Mr. Ford is a graduate of Hamilton College and the Production Workshop at Third World Newsreel.
The Guardian said of his directorial debut, “There’s something different about Strong Island … a film characterized by raw emotion and calm anger, which must surely be considered one of the finest documentaries of 2017…”
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.