About the team

Yance Ford (Director, Producer) is a recipient of the Creative Capital Theo Westenberger Award, a MacDowell Colony fellow, a Sundance Documentary Film Program fellow, and was among Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Ford is an architectural welder, and while at Modern Art Foundry, assembled the sculpture “Maman” by Louise Bourgeois, the series of three spiders exhibited at Rockefeller Center and which are now on permanent display at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Joslyn Barnes (Producer) is a writer and producer. Among the films she has been involved with producing since co-founding Louverture Films together with actor Danny Glover and partners Susan Rockefeller and Bertha Foundation are: the feature documentaries Trouble the Water, The Black Power Mix Tape 1967-1975, The House I Live In, Concerning Violence, Shadow World, and the forthcoming films Idiom by RaMell Ross, Angels Are Made of Light by James Longley, and Aquarela by Victor Kossakovsky; the narrative features Bamako, The Time That Remains, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Narrow Frame of Midnight, Cemetery of Splendor, White Sun, and the forthcoming Zama by Lucrecia Martel.

Signe Byrge Sørensen (Co Producer) is a two-time Oscar nominated film producer for the documentary films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. She was nominated for a Producers Guild of America Award in 2016 for The Look of Silence. She won Cinema Eye Honors for the production of both films. She has also won the Danish Documentary and film awards: the Roos Prize (2014), the Timbuktu Prize (2014) and the Ib Producer award (2016). Signe has been a producer since 1998, first in SPOR Media, then in Final Cut Productions Aps. In 2009 she and Anne K√∂hncke founded Final Cut for Real. She has produced documentaries in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Thailand, Indonesia, Colombia, Argentina, in addition to Scandinavia. She holds a master’s degree in international development studies and communication studies from Roskilde University (1998), Denmark, and is a EURODOC (2003) and EAVE (2010) graduate.

Alan Jacobsen (Director of Photography) is a graduate of NYU’s TSOA, who began his career as a gaffer. He has gone on to shoot on over 20 narrative and documentary films, including The Trials of Darryl Hunt by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, Racing Dreams by Marshall Curry, Election Day by Katy Chevigny, Wet Dreams and False Images by Jessie Epstein and Toe to Toe by director Emily Abt.

Janus Billeskov Jansen (Editor) first started working in the Danish film industry in 1970. He has edited a large number of internationally acknowledged feature films and documentaries and directed numerous Danish documentaries. Since 1979, he has taught editing and narratology at the National Film School of Denmark. Billeskov Jansen has worked with influential Danish directors, most significantly a lifelong creative collaboration with the Palme d’Or and Academy Award winning director Billie August. He is the editor of the documentary Family, honoured with the Joris Ivens Award in 2001. Billeskov Jansen won Danish Film Academy Awards in 1984, 1988 and 1995, and an Honourary Bodil Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. In 2009 he was the winner of the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Film Editing Award for his work on Burma VJ.

Strong Island is a Cinereach grantee.

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