Sam Pollard

Slavery by Another Name, narrated by Laurence Fishburne, is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans' most cherished assumptions: that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South after the Civil War, new systems of involuntary servitude took its place with shocking force and brutality. The film documents how for more than 80 years, thousands...

In the mid-1960s, Lowndes County, Alabama had zero registered Black voters despite an 80% Black population. Through first person accounts and searing archival footage, this documentary chronicles the citizens' movement and young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers led by Stokely Carmichael who risked their lives for Black voting rights.

Zora Neale Hurston, path-breaking novelist, pioneering anthropologist and one of the first black women to enter the American literary canon (*Their Eyes Were Watching God*), established the African American vernacular as one of the most vital, inventive voices in American literature. This definitive film biography, eighteen years in the making, portrays Zora in all her complexity: gifted, flamboyant, and controversial but always fiercely original....

Explores the life and music of the legendary drummer, bandleader and social activist--a remarkable series of creative peaks, personal struggles and reinventions--from Jim Crow to the Civil Rights years, from the heady days of post-war modern jazz to hip hop and beyond.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered today as an American hero: a bridge-builder, a shrewd political tactician, and a moral leader. Yet throughout his history-altering political career, he was often treated by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies like an enemy of the state. This documentary lays out a detailed account of the FBI surveillance that dogged King's activism throughout the '50s and '60s, fueled by the racist and red-baiting...

Music has been a constant in human history, an intermingling of voice and instrument that for all its local variation and increasing sophistication nevertheless endured in more or less the same form for centuries. Then came recording--and music was forever transformed. Soundbreaking, an eight-part event television series, traces this ongoing sonic revolution, and explores the nexus of cutting-edge technology and human artistry that has created the...

Directed by Spike Lee, this two-part, four hour documentary revisits New Orleans five years after Katrina, and four years since the premiere of Lee's landmark, triple Emmy-winning HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Featuring many of the principals seen in the first documentary, the new film opens with February's celebratory Super Bowl parade before delving into such issues as relocation, rebuilding, mental-health concerns,...

"Sinatra: all or nothing at all is an up-close and personal examination of the life, music and career of the legendary entertainer. Told in his own words from hours of archived interviews, along with commentary from those closest to him, the documentary weaves the music and images from Sinatra's life together with rarely seen footage of Sinatra's famous 1971 'Retirement' Concert in Los Angeles. The film's narrative is shaped by Sinatra's song choices...

Examines entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.'s journey to create his own identity, as a black man who embraced Judaism, through the shifting tides of civil rights and racial progress; a veteran of increasingly outdated show business traditions, he strove to stay relevant, even as he found himself bracketed by the bigotry of white America and the distaste of black America. Features new interviews with Billy Crystal, Norman Lear, Jerry Lewis, Whoopi Goldberg,...

"Sinatra: all or nothing at all is an up-close and personal examination of the life, music and career of the legendary entertainer. Told in his own words from hours of archived interviews, along with commentary from those closest to him, the documentary weaves the music and images from Sinatra's life together with rarely seen footage of Sinatra's famous 1971 'Retirement' Concert in Los Angeles. The film's narrative is shaped by Sinatra's song choices...