Yance Ford: The Filmmaker Behind Strong Island

For Black History Month, we're looking at Yance Ford, the documentary filmmaker behind "Strong Island" — a director and producer who has spent his career pulling truth out of stories other people would rather leave closed.

Ford, an African-American transgender filmmaker, graduated from Hamilton College in 1994 and put in ten years as a series producer at PBS. His curatorial work there earned 5 Emmy Awards and 16 Emmy nominations, and in 2011 Filmmaker Magazine named him one of its 25 New Faces of Independent Film. The résumé was building toward something.

"Strong Island" is that something. The documentary examines the 1992 murder of Ford's brother, William Ford, and what the loss did to their family — and, past that, what it revealed about racial injustice and a criminal justice system that failed them. The film is intimate and reflective. It asks the audience to sit inside the grief rather than watch it from a distance. It earned a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at the 90th Academy Awards, and with it Ford became the first openly transgender director ever nominated for an Oscar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h64qugj_iDg

In 2018, Ford and Joslyn Barnes won an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking for "Strong Island." That made Ford the first openly transgender man — and the first Black openly transgender person — to win an Emmy, and the first openly transgender filmmaker to win a Creative Arts Emmy. Strip the firsts away and the film still holds on its own: a close study of grief, family, and racial injustice in America.

The work has kept coming. Ford directed an episode of the 2020 documentary series "Trial By Media," staying with the hard, painful subjects — the cases where a camera can force a second look and maybe some change.

Ford's films make a plain argument: a personal story, told straight, can indict a whole system. That is why his work belongs in any honest account of Black History Month — and why the record he is still building matters well beyond it.