Words matter. These are the best Yance Ford Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Instincts are a really important guide for any artist, but particularly filmmakers because it takes a lot to stay true to your instincts as a storyteller.
If my making history makes it easier for a trans kid at home somewhere to feel more at home in their skin, then I’m so excited about that.
‘Strong Island’ has been a labor of love and dedication on the part of so many people, that it’s just an incredible recognition to be honored. And to be the first trans director – and, I believe, the first African-American trans director – to be nominated for an Academy Award is incredibly, incredibly special to me.
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.
I hope that audiences understand that there is a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address, that there has always been a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address. In fact, our country is built on the precariousness of black lives, the disposability of black lives.
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.
My father just believed in my mother’s ability to do anything.
There are people who get to be three-dimensional humans in the United States, and there are people who do not.
I worked at ‘POV’ for five years before I told one person about my brother.
Grief is a very complicated monster. There’s no real exorcising of it. It has a different form every day.
I will never understand how so many young women can go out in the freezing cold wearing so little clothing.
When I use the word ‘buzz’ in successive sentences, it’s clearly time for me to stop writing.
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.
‘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.
I think fear has been racialised. When you get someone who says ‘I was afraid’ of a big black guy, that’s enough to say, ‘Okay, not guilty,’ or, ‘No indictment.’ It’s persisted over generations, and it needs to stop.
‘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.
Our blackness and how to survive being black in America was something that our parents instilled in us extraordinarily well.
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.
The justice system isn’t meant to work for people of color in this country.
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.
There is nothing quite as exciting as watching a master at work.
It’s important that people understand that ‘Strong Island’ is just as much about this claim of reasonable fear and our need to interrogate reasonable fear as it is about my family’s grief.
I have been gender-nonconforming my entire life.
If I can help one family embrace their child and not displace them and throw them out, I’m happy about that.
We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.
