Posted by Dallas VideoFest

Veteran editor, producer, and director Sam Pollard is among cinema's most dedicated chroniclers of the Black experience, the International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award. His films have garnered numerous awards such as Peabodys, Emmys, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2020. 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. In this virtuosic documentary, award-winning editor and director Sam Pollard (Editor, 4 LITTLE GIRLS, MO’ BETTER BLUES; Director/Producer, EYEZ ON THE PRIZE, SAMMY DAVIS, JR.: I’VE GOTTA BE ME) 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 paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover. In crafting a rich archival tapestry, featuring some revelatory restored footage of King, Pollard urges us to remember that true American progress is always hard-won. https://www.mlkfbi.com/ BLACK ART: IN THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT is directed and produced by award-winning documentarian Sam Pollard (HBO’s “Atlanta Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children”), executive produced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Thelma Golden serves as consulting producer. The film will be available on HBO and to stream on HBO Max. At the heart of this feature documentary is the groundbreaking exhibition, entitled “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” curated by the late African American artist and scholar David Driskell in 1976. This pioneering exhibition, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, featured more than 200 works of art by 63 artists and cemented the essential contributions of Black artists in America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The exhibit would eventually travel to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Brooklyn Museum. The film shines a light on the extraordinary impact of that exhibit on generations of African American artists who have staked a claim on their rightful place within the 21st-century art world. https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/black-art-in-the-absence-of-light