Creative Capital would like to congratulate filmmaker Yance Ford on receiving a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his Creative Capital Project Strong Island! Yance received a Creative Capital Award in 2012 to develop the documentary, an examination of the violent death of the filmmaker’s brother 25 years ago, and the judicial system that allowed his killer to go free. Since then, the making of the documentary has received extensive support from the film community, including a MacArthur Foundation Documentary Grant in 2014. Strong Island premiered at Sundance Film Festival, and screened in theaters across the country, including the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. In 2017, Netflix began streaming Strong Island.

We spoke to Yance last year about the documentary, who said that back in 2012,

My Facebook feed blew up with people saying “now more than ever” and unfortunately, it was the beginning of 5 years of more and more senseless deaths of unarmed black people by white people, civilians, and police officers. The fact that this awareness has grown from social media and cell phones, it became really important in the face of all this death that the film be blisteringly honest. The integrity of the film lies in its honesty, and one thing Strong Island pushes back against is the narrative of the need for the victim to be perfect. It was very important that I allowed my brother to be fully formed, complicated, young, and figuring it out, just as any young white man is able to be.

Congratulations to Yance Ford and his full team on this significant achievement—we’re honored to have been able to help along the way. See you at the Oscars!
Read more about Strong Island on the official website.