Film phase:Completed

SYNOPSIS

Set in the suburbs of the black middle class, Strong Island seeks to uncover how—in the year of the Rodney King trial and the Los Angeles riots—the murder of the filmmaker’s older brother went unpunished. The film is an unflinching look at homicide, racial injustice, and the corrosive impact of grief over time.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Director and producer Yance Ford was one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film (2011). He is a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow, recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital Award & Theo Westenberger Award, and a MacDowell Colony fellow. From 2002 to 2012, Yance was Series Producer of POV, where his work curating the acclaimed documentary series garnered 16 Emmy nominations. Yance is a graduate of Hamilton College and the production workshop at Third World Newsreel.

NOW PLAYING

Strong Island was nominated for a 2018 Academy Award® in Best Documentary Feature, and was awarded Best Documentary by the Black Film Critics Circle (BFCC) in 2017. The film won the Bruce Sinofsky Prize for Documentary Feature at the 2017 Montclair Film Festival and was included in DOC NYC’s 2017 Short List program which features 15 of the year’s best documentaries. It was also honored by the International Documentary Association (IDA) and nominated for its 2017 Best Feature award. Strong Island premiered at Sundance, and you can stream it now on Netflix.