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Filmmaker Yance Ford Curates Full Frame’s 2025 Thematic Program
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 Thematic Program composes a portion of the 2025 festival lineup. The complete festival lineup will be announced on March 11, 2025. “The Weight of a Question: Documentary and the Art of Inquiry” 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.”
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 Japenese 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?