Yance Ford Quotes
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I would hate for people to think that 'Strong Island' is just about a family's grief. It is about a family's grief, yes, but it is also an interrogation of our criminal justice system.
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It would be easier for people to grasp that gender, sex, and sexual orientation are different things if we had as much imagination in real life as we do when we are making our movies.
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When I use the word 'buzz' in successive sentences, it's clearly time for me to stop writing.
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'Strong Island' is not your typical true-crime film. It's not actually about the uncovering of evidence or following leads that hadn't been seen before or any of that stuff.
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'Strong Island' is slang for Long Island, New York. And it really grew out of - what may surprise people, it really grew out of the very vibrant hip-hop scene that, you know, is located and still generates artists out of Long Island.
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I have been gender-nonconforming my entire life.
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The quality of festival Q&As is often a matter of chance. Sometimes the lights come up on movies I loved, and not a single meaningful question is asked. Sometimes it's the opposite.
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There are people who get to be three-dimensional humans in the United States, and there are people who do not.
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When I was making 'Strong Island,' it was very clear to me that my brother's death was a point on a line that stretched back into the 1940s and beyond in my family - and in the nation.
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White communities - and I exempt poor white communities from this - have power over their representation. White people have the ability to define themselves, to exert their agency in a way that they get to be believed. No one believes black people. No one. Until a white person vouches for them.
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What 'Strong Island' does is bring a historical perspective and help people understand that what we're treating as a modern-day phenomenon is actually not modern. It's actually quite old.
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Our blackness and how to survive being black in America was something that our parents instilled in us extraordinarily well.
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I remind audiences that I'm in the fortunate position to make a film about my family.
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I have a lot of surrogate parents, but there's no one like your mother.
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If I can help one family embrace their child and not displace them and throw them out, I'm happy about that.
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The justice system isn't meant to work for people of color in this country.
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Black lives are too easy to take in America because we don't want to question why people are so afraid of black and brown people to begin with. And that's what I want 'Strong Island' to do.
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It would have been tough for anyone to adapt 'Push' - an amazing but wrenching novel by Sapphire - for the screen, and I think director Lee Daniels made interesting choices, particularly with Precious' fantasies. In my view, some of them work and some do not, but they are definitely provocative directorial choices.
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We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.
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Film festivals are usually unpleasant experiences on some level. The lines are ridiculous, the crowds are ridiculous, or the schedules are impossibly arranged: 'You say that there's a film you really want to see? Try the 8 A.M. show! Oh, it's too bad you didn't get to bed until 2 A.M. the night before.'
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Grief is a very complicated monster. There's no real exorcising of it. It has a different form every day.
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Violence against the other, and the way we otherize people out of fear, has to be examined across the board.
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People come up and say, 'Thank you' for showing a black family loving their masculine-presenting child and for undoing the myth of black people as being rabidly homophobic.
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What little return documentary filmmakers get often comes in the form of recognition by their peers and the critics who influence doc audiences around the country.