Yance Ford

I don't feel like a hero.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My brother's death picked up my life and put it down somewhere else. I had an image of myself in my mind as a working artist, and when he died, all of that changed.

Everyone in the street where I grew up was given the same message: You can be anything; you can do anything. That wasn't extraordinary; that was ordinary for us. My folks didn't believe in black exceptionalism. There's nothing exceptional about 'You can have that, too' - except when it comes to justice. You can't have that.

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.

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.

Grief is a very complicated monster. There's no real exorcising of it. It has a different form every day.

I'm incredibly proud to be the first trans director to be nominated for an Oscar.

My impression is that the Academy is really sincere about moving toward a more inclusive and representative Hollywood.

I had a list of 10 rules when we started 'Strong Island,' and one of them was, 'Yance will never appear on camera with sync sound.'

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.

I worked at 'POV' for five years before I told one person about my brother.

I don't think I present as gender-conforming on screen, but some people need a little extra information.

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.

I have been gender-nonconforming my entire life.

Grief, for me, is a moment-to-moment experience.

I have a lot of surrogate parents, but there's no one like your mother.

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.

We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.

'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.

There are people who get to be three-dimensional humans in the United States, and there are people who do not.

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.