Red Emma’s

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 1700’s and the first publicly funded police departments of the 1800’s to the uprisings of the 1960’s and 2020’s.

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) 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 went on to win the Gotham Award for Best Documentary and the Black Film Critics Circle Award for Best Doc. STRONG ISLAND 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 went on to win the Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Film and was nominated for a George Foster Peabody Award. At the 2018 Cinema Eye Honors, Ford became the first nominee ever to win for Best Direction, Best Debut and Best Feature. His work can be seen in the FX series PRIDE, the Netflix series TRIAL BY MEDIA, the Apple+ series THE ME YOU CAN’T SEE, the Showtime comedy WORK IN PROGRESS and the documentary THE COLOR OF CARE on The Smithsonian Channel. Ford was a staff writer in the HBO mini-room for the adaptation of the bestselling novel THE VANISHING HALF.

Yance is a former Series Producer at the PBS documentary anthology series POV where, during his tenure with the series, his curatorial work at POV garnered 5 Emmy Awards and 16 Emmy nominations. Ford is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and Sundance Institute Fellow and was named to Variety’s 10 Documakers to Watch and The Root 100. Ford was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. His work has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, Cinereach, The Ford Foundation and others. Ford is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Directors Guild of America and the Guild of Future Architects.

STUART SCHRADER is a scholar of race, policing, and counterinsurgency.