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. Yance Ford is a Sundance Institute Fellow, a Creative Capital Grantee and featured in Filmmaker Magazines 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. Joslyn Barnes is a writer and producer. Among the films she has been involved with producing since co-founding Louverture Films together with actor Danny Glover and partners Susan Rockefeller and Bertha Foundation are: the feature documentaries Trouble the Water, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, The House I Live In, Concerning Violence, Shadow World, and the forthcoming films Tigmi Nigren by Tala Hadid, Idiom by RaMell Ross, Angels Are Made of Light by James Longley, and Aquarela by Victor Kossakovsky; the narrative features Bamako, The Time That Remains, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Narrow Frame of Midnight, Cemetery of Splendour, White Sun, and the forthcoming Zama by Lucrecia Martel. Signe Byrge Sørensen is a two-time Oscar® nominee for producing The Act of Killing in 2014 and The Look of Silence in 2016. ...Read More