Filmmaker Yance Ford Curates Full Frame’s 2025 Thematic Program

DURHAM, N.C. ­– Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Yance Ford will curate the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s 2025 Thematic Program, “The Weight of a Question: Documentary and the Art of Inquiry.”

The program presents eight features and three short films that invite viewers to wrestle with complex—and at times, uncomfortable—questions about the world around them. Ford will present the lineup and take part in discussions with filmmakers following the screenings. Guests will be announced in the coming weeks.

“I’m thrilled to curate the 2025 Thematic Program at Full Frame,” said Ford. “These films don’t simply document; they provoke, challenge, and demand reflection. From deeply personal narratives to formally inventive works, each selection disrupts easy conclusions, pushing us to confront power, ideology, history, and the ways we are entangled in these forces.”

Ford continued, “Full Frame has always been an essential space—one where the absence of market pressures allows the work itself to drive conversation. Here, audiences and filmmakers engage with documentary as an evolving, urgent practice, creating an environment for meaningful dialogue that lingers long after the festival ends. I hope this program inspires viewers not just to watch, but to engage—to sit with discomfort, question assumptions, and approach the present moment with fresh urgency and nuance.”

“We are honored to have Yance Ford join us in this significant way,” said Festival Co-Director and Artistic Director Sadie Tillery. “I am drawn to documentary films that ask me to test and stretch my preconceived notions and surface-level understandings. Simply put, I watch films to grow, as I believe many audiences do. Yance’s films Strong Island and Power invite profound reflection in ways that are artful and steadfast, sensitive and direct. It’s humbling to see the idea of audience engagement come into focus through his selections for this year’s Thematic Program.”

Ford is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning director, producer, and writer whose groundbreaking work in documentary film has reshaped the landscape of nonfiction storytelling. With over two decades of experience, Ford’s films and television work have been featured on Netflix, Showtime, FX, Apple TV+, and the Smithsonian Channel, among others.

Ford’s directorial debut, Strong Island, premiered at Sundance and played festivals around the world. The film won the Gotham Award for Best Documentary and a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking, while also earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Strong Island garnered critical acclaim for its searing examination of race, justice, and loss. 

In 2024, Ford directed and produced Power, a Netflix original documentary tracing the origins of American policing. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before launching worldwide. The L.A. Times wrote, “Power deserves to become the definitive popular history of policing in America, urgent, astute, capacious, captivating—in part, because it integrates the present as no academic treatise could, with visceral horror. A tale of sound and fury, signifying everything.”

A sought-after educator and mentor, Ford is currently teaching at NYU Tisch and regularly instructs master classes at institutions such as Yale, the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A MacDowell and Guggenheim Fellow, Ford is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America.

Strong Island screened at the 2017 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, where it received the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award and the Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award. At the 2024 festival, Power screened in Fletcher Hall with Ford in attendance. A longtime attendee of the festival, Ford has also participated as a juror on the Full Frame Grand Jury Award and the Jury Award for Best Short.

The 27th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival runs April 3–6, 2025. Passes are now on sale at https://www.fullframefest.org/attend/passes-tickets/

2025 Thematic Program
The Weight of a Question: Documentary and the Art of Inquiry

Inextinguishable Fire / (Director: Harun Farocki)
“When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you’ll shut your eyes. You’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close them to the memory. And then you’ll close your eyes to the facts.” These words are spoken at the beginning of this agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: “When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories.”

The Infiltrators / (Directors: Cristina Ibarra, Alex Rivera)
The Infiltrators is a docu-thriller that tells the true story of young undocumented immigrants who are arrested by Border Patrol and put in a shadowy for-profit detention center—on purpose. The protagonists are members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group of radical Dreamers who are on a mission to stop deportations. And the best place to stop deportations, they believe, is in detention. However, when the activists try to pull off their heist—a kind of ‘prison break’ in reverse—things don’t go according to plan.

Night and Fog / (Director: Alain Resnais)
Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek in Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), one of the first cinematic reflections on the Holocaust. Juxtaposing the stillness of the abandoned camps’ empty buildings with haunting wartime footage, Resnais investigates humanity’s capacity for violence, and presents the devastating suggestion that such horrors could occur again.

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes / (Director: Brett Story)
More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives.

Reluctantly Queer / (Director: Akosua Adoma Owusu)
This epistolary short film invites us into the unsettling life of a young Ghanaian man struggling to reconcile his love for his mother with his love for same-sex desire amid the increased tensions incited by same-sex politics in Ghana. Focused on a letter that is ultimately filled with hesitation and uncertainty, Reluctantly Queer both disrobes and questions what it means to be queer for this man in this time and space.

Something Strong Within / (Director: Robert A. Nakamura)
Created for the Japanese American National Museum’s exhibition, America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience, this critically acclaimed, award-winning film features haunting compilation of rarely-seen home movies of the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Southern Comfort / (Director: Kate Davis)
Southern Comfort tells the story of Robert Eads, a 52-year-old trans man who lives in the back hills of Georgia. “A hillbilly and proud of it,” he says, tobacco pipe in hand. But Robert was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and turned away by more than two dozen doctors for treatment.  As his health declines, Robert falls in love with Lola, a trans-woman, and the film becomes a tale of love in the face of transphobia as it unfolds before the camera. 

Spit on the Broom / (Director: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich)
Spit on the Broom is a surrealist documentary that explores the margins of the history of the African American women’s group the United Order of Tents, a clandestine organization of black women organized in the 1840s during the height of the Underground Railroad. The film uses excerpts from the public record, newspaper articles related to the Tents from over the course of 100 years, and a visual tapestry of fable and myth as a way to introduce a history that remains secret.

Tarnation / (Director: Jonathan Caouette)
A pioneering, ahead-of-its-time work in the development of the autobiographical documentary, Jonathan Caouette’s cathartic film diary swirls together Super 8 and VHS home movies, answering machine messages, family photographs, and other records of a lifetime. It tells the story of Caouette’s tumultuous childhood, his coming out as gay, and his complex relationship with his schizophrenic mother, a former beauty queen whose life was derailed by the electroshock treatments she received in her youth.

Tonsler Park / (Director: Kevin Jerome Everson)
In Tonsler Park, Kevin Jerome Everson trains his black-and-white 16 mm camera on the activity around voting precincts in Charlottesville, Virginia (future site of the infamous white supremacist Unite the Right rally), on Election Day, November 8, 2016—a day that would prove pivotal in the course of American democracy. Capturing, in detail, the vital work of mostly Black civil servants and citizens engaging in the democratic process, Everson pointedly centers their participation in a system that has long sought to disenfranchise them.

Well-Founded Fear / (Directors: Shari Robertson, Michael Camerini)
With unprecedented access, filmmakers Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson enter the closed corridors of the INS to reveal the dramatic real-life stage where human rights and American ideals collide with the nearly impossible task of trying to know the truth. The law says asylum can be offered if someone has a well-founded fear of persecution. Three times a day, the job is to decide the applicants’ fates. Political asylum—who deserves it? Who gets it? Who decides? 

About Full Frame 

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is an internationally recognized event that proudly presents the best nonfiction films on the festival circuit each year. Based in Durham, North Carolina, the annual festival gathers thousands of enthusiastic fans from around the world to celebrate the documentary art form, engage in meaningful conversation, and experience the impact of exceptional nonfiction cinema firsthand. The 27th annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival takes place April 3–6, 2025.

The festival is a program of Duke University’s  Center for Documentary Studies and receives support from corporate sponsors, private foundations, and individual donors whose generosity provides the foundation that makes the event possible. The 2025 festival is produced through a partnership with Duke Venue and Production Management. The Presenting Sponsor of the festival is Duke University.

To learn more about the mission of Full Frame or how to support Full Frame, visit fullframefest.org.

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