The director’s sophomore documentary, Power, dredges centuries of police violence to imagine something new.
In the final moments of director Yance Ford’s documentary Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery, who covered the aftermath of Michael Brown’s 2014 murder in Ferguson, Missouri, quotes abolitionist leader and writer Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Ford repeats this quote as the screen fades to black, a fitting end to a film that excavates the purpose policing has served and demands panoramic change.
Part archival portrait, part essay, and part contemporary polemic, Power is careful and open in its approach to one of today’s most pressing and painful issues. Ford leads the film as narrator, wading through immersive footage and searing commentary from talking heads with probing and profound questions. “What demands are we going to make of policing going forward,” asks Ford, “so that we can arrive at a definition of public safety that is not about violence, coercion, and control, and so that we can reimagine what people need to be safe in their communities, based on what they say they need?”
This is not the first time Ford has explored justice and policing onscreen: His first movie, Strong Island, which earned the director an Oscar nomination in 2018, investigates how his brother, William, was shot and killed by a white auto body worker, who, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, was never indicted. As William’s friends and family make sense of this tragedy onscreen, the film bears witness to one family’s loss, while also exploring how judicial systems continue to fracture the country.
For Queue, writer-director-producer Ford shares his approach to such an expansive issue, and how he hopes Power will inform and inspire change.
An edited version of the conversation follows.
Brookie McIlvaine: Talk to me about the genesis of Power, and how you decided to take this on as your next project.
Yance Ford: It was born of multiple places but really sprang to life in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the protests that I watched around the city and the country and the world. The police response to those protests was unlike any I had seen in my life — it had an edge, a violence and anger that were very thinly veiled. I found myself asking, in a way that felt different than before: Is this what police are for? This doesn’t feel right. These folks are protesting [on behalf of] someone who was murdered by a police officer.
Can you describe the research process for this film?
YF: We had six months of research before we started production. An archivist named Vanessa Maruskin, [producer] Netsanet Negussie, and I spent six months writing about policing and researching people who were thinking about policing, but also going deep into different archives to see its representations and the ways in which police have represented themselves and the work that they do.
On the wall of my office, there must have been a hundred cards with different themes, ideas, and questions. One of the things that I really encouraged Jillian Bergman, the archivist for the film, to do — and she really picked up and ran with — was this idea to not be literal in her investigation. I encouraged her to let her imagination lead the inquiry, to see what connections she could make between the themes that were emerging in the film and the footage that she was finding. I think that she did a marvelous job.
The film goes back to the 1700s, but it’s not chronological. It blends archival and current footage, which makes the eras bleed together in this terrifying but really effective way. Can you talk to me about that choice?
YF: We really wanted to use archival material in a way that enabled it to speak to the present moment, present police tactics. We tend to confine our history to the past. At one point in the film, there’s a very old clip of someone in a choke hold, and you realize that that’s from 1800-something. The film’s use of time gives it a dynamic quality that a straight chronological approach would have missed.
How did you decide to divide the film into chapters centering on specific themes?
YF: We were thinking about the film as an essay with chapters, and we wanted to do something different with our graphic design. We got this fantastic company called Past Curfew and talked to them about the themes in the film, and they came up with these great double-layered graphics for us to use.
The specific [chapter titles] came out of the interviews with people in the film, like “violence work,” which was a phrase I wasn’t familiar with before we interviewed [writer and teacher] Micol [Seigel]. “Status quo” came straight from my writing about that moment in the film. “Counterinsurgency” came from [writer, professor, and consulting producer] Stuart Schrader; he talks about how police policed protest as if it were counterinsurgency work. [The chapter names] are so interesting because [they come from] people who’ve been thinking and writing about policing and carceral logic for a long time.
The editor, Ian Olds, with whom you co-wrote the film, juxtaposes newsreel and informational footage with analysis from various experts. Can you tell me about the editing process?
YF: Ian and I believe that editing is a collaborative effort, and it’s where the film comes together. Every moment of the film, when you’re in it, is the most important moment, because that’s when the film reveals itself to you. The process of building the architecture of meaning across the arc of the movie really took experimentation. It happened in a way that I, in best-case scenarios, hope it happens every time.
One of the most powerful parts of Strong Island is your narration. Can you tell me about narrating Power, and how that was different?
YF: With Strong Island, my voice was very much rooted in a personal experience. My character, like the other characters in the film, was a guide through the text as well as someone who was giving testimony. Everybody got a chance to testify in Strong Island in a way that they didn’t get to testify in real life.
In Power, my voice is one that’s driven by this very serious inquiry into our history and the history of policing. Every question I ask is deliberately posed to the audience because I want people to think about the questions that my voice brings up. I’m really attracted to the idea of using my narration as a structural element in film. In Power, we are learning something together. That’s one of the reasons we chose people who are teachers. At the beginning of every interview, I would say, “Listen, you have to imagine that I’m your worst student. Don’t assume that I know anything.” With that approach, we got incredible material.
Charlie Adams, inspector of Minneapolis, Minnesota’s fourth precinct
How did you select the participants and balance their perspectives and identities?
YF: We wanted to choose experts that looked like America. We wanted to have a strong representation of people of color and women. We wanted people who could speak from personal experience, [such as Queens, New York resident] Nilesh, [inspector of Minneapolis, Minnesota’s fourth precinct] Charlie Adams, and Baher [Azmy], the attorney who sued the N.Y.P.D.
Each person slots into one of the pillars in the structure that hold up the institution: the court system, the cop on the ground, the lawyers who practice law, the people who are victims of police misconduct, and then people like journalists, who write about the police. Ultimately, though, you see that Charlie Adams is like everyone else in the institution of policing: restricted by the boundaries of the institution in which he works.
In the director’s statement, you say, “The history of policing over centuries is the best evidence we have to show that we need to imagine something new.” Can you say more on why you decided to orient Power to be forward-looking?
YF: The debates about policing, as well as the attempts to reform policing, haven’t worked. [Police reform] hasn’t actually achieved a model of policing that’s based on an idea of public safety that includes everyone. When we go to the Frederick Douglass quote [at the end of the film], that’s the real question the film asks of each viewer.
We can’t keep going this way. We’ve seen what happened in New York City recently, and on other campuses in different countries; you could have been running that tape from 1968 at Columbia University and it would have been the same exact thing. All of it: the press conferences, the administration, the break-ins. That to me is really scary because it means that they’ve learned nothing from that experience, and we have to learn.
How do you maintain your own sense of hope when dealing with such excruciating stories, footage, and facts?
YF: I think silence in the face of these institutions — that are not working in the ways I think Americans think they work — would leave me hopeless. The fact that I decide that I’m going to make a film about this institution and really take a thirty-thousand-foot look at how we got here, that makes me hopeful.
The response of the audiences that we’ve shared the film with so far makes me hopeful. People want to ask questions in ways that are different from the questions they’ve asked before. All of that makes me feel like Power will be a contribution to a canon of films about policing that helps people see a new way forward.
