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Yance Ford on Strong Island

After Yance Ford’s brother William was murdered in 1992, when Yance Ford was a college student, she imagined making a film about his death. Finally, in 2017, having worked for many years with television’s POV, seeing independent documentaries into the public arena (and having transitioned to male), Ford completed Strong Island, a feature-length, personal documentary that investigates William’s death within a context of the former and subsequent lives of his parents and siblings. As a crime story, Strong Island is both suspenseful and beautiful to look at. And it is personally performative for Ford. The unusually intimate close-ups of his face, his dramatization of William’s falling to his death in front of the gas station where he was murdered, and his conversations with family and friends dramatize the way in which this family tragedy and cultural injustice continues to inform the lives of those who knew William.