Strong Island
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A Cut in Time: RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes and Maya Krinsky Break Down a Scene from Hale County This Morning, This Evening
“The discovering began after I moved to Alabama in 2009 to teach photography and coach basketball. Photographing in my day-to-day, I began filming using time to figure out how we’ve come to be seen.” — RaMell Ross, Hale County This Morning, This Evening The film Hale County This Morning, This Evening defies easy summary. It’s an ontological inquiry: a pushback against dominant narratives of what it means to be black in the historic South, an invitation to the African American diaspora to return to its roots and participate in the reimaging of blackness. It’s also a poetic exaltation of two young […]
by Genevieve Jacobson on Sep 17, 2018 -
Personal Doesn’t Mean Small: IFP Week Filmmakers On Tackling Big Issues With Intimate Stories
“I think we have this profound misrepresentation around personal films being small,” said Cecilia Aldarondo, one of three filmmakers of personal docs who spoke at IFP Week 2017. The panel was called “When the Personal Gets Political and the Political Gets Personal.” In the case of all three filmmakers’ films, they’re both. “I’ve gotten so many responses from potential funders of people who think that way. They hear ‘personal’ and they hear ‘small.’ They think it won’t have an audience. With these projects, I think we’ve demonstrated that’s not the case. If we’re dealing with questions of social change and […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 22, 2017 -
Forced Perspective: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Consider the physical closeness necessary to feel air pass out of the lungs and through the nose of a Black man, the spatial distance needed for your nose to touch his sigh. Face to almost blurry face — so much that when the corners of his mouth dart up, down and around, when talking or gesturing or from involuntary conduct, you notice the landscape between his corresponding cheek and chin bow like the warping of a shimmering trampoline. The pinhole pores of this brown-laden terrain become another optical reveal that transpires only after your mind’s eye adjusts to the formerly […]
by RaMell Ross on Sep 14, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Yance Ford, a 2011 Filmmaker 25 New Face, premiered his feature documentary debut Strong Island at Sundance this year, and the film’s new trailer has just dropped from Netflix. One of this year’s essential docs, Strong Island is a formally assured, highly thoughtful examination of racial injustice, family tragedy and the complexities of memory and grief. Filmmaker Contributing Editor Brandon Harris wrote about the film earlier this year at The New Yorker: In the annals of cinematic memoir, there are very few films like Yance Ford’s Strong Island, a stylish and wrenching rumination on familial grief that had its première […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2017 -
“You Are Forced to Look Very Carefully”: DP Alan Jacobsen on Strong Island
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“A Challenge for Some in the Audience”: Director Yance Ford | Strong Island
