#E3Salute to Yance Ford for being the first transgender filmmaker to ever be nominated for an Oscar with his documentary Strong Island.
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.
.@yford is the first transgender filmmaker to ever be nominated for an Oscar with his documentary @StrongIslandDoc. We go “Behind the Lens” in a series sponsored by @WaltDisneyWorld. https://t.co/2r5EeWawdG pic.twitter.com/53dm7Nbrsb
— Good Morning America (@GMA) March 3, 2018
More About Yance
Yance Ford is a Sundance Institute Fellow, a Creative Capital Grantee and featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. A graduate of Hamilton College and the Production Workshop at Third World Newsreel, he is a former series producer of the PBS anthology series POV. The Root 100 recently named Ford among the most influential African Americans of 2017 and in December the International Documentary Association will present him with their Emerging Filmmaker Award.