Strong Island

  • Wednesday, Apr 18, 2018

    7 PM (140 mins)

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Strong Island

Free screening for BAMPFA members and UC Berkeley students only

  • A bald Black man in a dark blazer and dog tag necklace gazes intensely against a black background.
    Les Blank Lecture

A masterpiece for difficult times. 

B. Ruby Rich, Film Quarterly

Les Blank Lecture: Yance Ford
Recorded April 18, 2018

Close-up of a Black man's face displayed on a camera's LCD screen with recording data overlays.

Yance Ford presents the third annual Les Blank Lecture at BAMPFA, in honor of the beloved local documentary filmmaker. Yance discusses his creative process and his 2017 film Strong Island.

Yance Ford’s older brother was murdered on Long Island in 1992, at age twenty-four. Although it was known who killed him, no one was convicted. Darryl Pinckney notes in the New Yorker, “In Yance Ford’s powerful, disturbing, and very personal documentary, details are important. . . . Strong Island is the story of a black family that could not sustain the blow of racial injustice and fell apart.” Ford follows all the threads—not only those related to the murder and the resulting investigation, but also the history of his family, who had tried to do everything right—through to the present and the ongoing racism plaguing black men.

FILM DETAILS

Cinematographer

  • Alan Jacobsen

Print Info

  • Color
  • Digital
  • 107 mins