Location: Red Emma’s, 3128 Greenmount Ave.

The Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, & Colonialism is pleased to sponsor a free screening of the documentary film Power by Yance Ford (2024) at Red Emma’s. After the screening, Yance Ford and Chloe Center director Stuart Schrader, who was a consulting producer on the film, will hold a Q+A, moderated by Steph Saxton (JHU Society of Fellows postdoctoral fellow).

In the United States, police have been granted extraordinary power over our individual lives. The police determine who is suspicious and who “fits the description.” They define the threats and decide how to respond. They demand obedience and carry the constant threat of violence. Thousands of these interactions play out in our cities and towns every day, according to real and perceived ideas of criminality and threats to social order—as decided by the police. Police make the abstract power of the state real.

Power traces the accumulation of money, the consolidation of political power, and the nearly unrestricted bipartisan support that has created the institution of policing as we know it. The film offers a visceral and immersive journey to demonstrate how we’ve arrived at this moment in history, from the slave patrols of the 1700s and the first publicly funded police departments of the 1800s to the uprisings of the 1960s and 2020s.

Part essay, part interview, and part archival collage, Power uses historical materials to illustrate our contemporary realities and examines urgent questions about a growing and largely unchecked authority—who is policed, who is protected, who gets to decide, and why.

Yance Ford (Director, Producer, Writer) [he/they] is an Oscar-nominated director and producer based in New York City. His feature documentary film Strong Island premiered at Sundance in 2017 to critical acclaim winning a Special Jury Award for storytelling. The film was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature at the 90th Academy Awards, where Ford made history as the first openly transgender director nominated for an Oscar. Strong Island received the Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film, the Gotham Award for Best Documentary, and the Black Film Critics Circle Award for Best Doc; was nominated for a George Foster Peabody Award; and won for Best Direction, Best Debut, and Best Feature at the Cinema Eye Honors.