“Urgent” is the kind of description that gets applied often to documentary content, which skews toward catalyzing positive change. But over the past few years, the genre has taken on new gravity—with Hollywood and the media industry as a whole crumbling under market pressures, storytelling that takes risks and offers counter-narratives is urgently needed.
On February 27, Full Frame Documentary Festival announced its thematic programming for this year’s festival, which runs April 3-6 in downtown Durham.
This year’s curator is the director, producer, and writer Yance Ford, who will lead the program “The Weight of a Question: Documentary and the Art of Inquiry.”
“We are honored to have Yance Ford join us in this significant way,” festival co-director and artistic director Sadie Tillery wrote in a press release. “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.”
Ford’s documentary Strong Island, which took a look back at the 1992 murder of his brother and the criminal justice system that ruled the murder self-defense, was nominated for a 2018 Oscar in the documentary feature category—a historic nod, as Ford was the first openly transgender director to be nominated for an Academy Award. His 2024 documentary Power, now available on Netflix, traces the history of policing—and its massive rise in scale—in the United States.
“Yance’s films Strong Island and Power invite profound reflection in ways that are artful and steadfast, sensitive and direct,” Tillery continued. “It’s humbling to see the idea of audience engagement come into focus through his selections for this year’s Thematic Program.”
Full Frame’s full schedule is slated to be released March 11, but the eight feature films and three shorts in the thematic series have been announced. Made at different times over the past few decades but screening at Full Frame during a Trump presidency, their scope, too, is urgent: There’s Southern Comfort, Kate Davis’s 2001 film documenting the final year in the life of Robert, a middle-aged trans man living in rural Georgia who is battling cancer while falling in love with Lola, a trans woman.
Then there’s Harun Farocki’s 1969 antiwar short film Inextinguishable Fire, which looks at napalm bombing in the Vietnam War—through the lens of a Dow Chemical plant in Michigan. (Here’s a seminal line from the film that remains evergreen: “When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories.”)
“These films don’t simply document; they provoke, challenge, and demand reflection,” Ford wrote in the press release. “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.”
Tickets for the 27th annual Full Frame are on sale now.
To comment on this story email arts@indyweek.com.