Sam Pollard Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

To study African-American history, which has become a politically charged act in America like no time since the early 1970s, is usually less about understanding a minority group and more about looking at the country’s character in a less glowing light. Which is why unsurprisingly, some would rather us forget African-American history altogether.  READ MORE: Director Sam Pollard on HBO’s ‘Black Art,’ ‘MLK/FBI’ His Work With Spike Lee & More [Deep Focus Podcast Interview] Fortunately for us, Sam Pollard is a filmmaker who has charged himself with ensuring we remember.

Addie Morfoot Contributor After making their first narrative feature “Nyad,” which debuted last year and earned Oscar nominations for the film’s stars Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, Academy Award winning directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (“Free Solo”) are returning to their documentary roots with “Photographer.” The six-part National Geographic docuseries features seven photographers — Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, Dan Winters, Campbell Addy, Krystle Wright, Muhammed Muheisen, and Anand Varma. Vérité footage of each subject’s current mission is interwoven with interviews and archival footage to demonstrate how each photographer approaches their work, the intention behind that work, their process, and how they each discover, see and experience the world.

Filmmaker Sam Pollard, one of the most prolific and important forces in contemporary documentary, will be honored by Black Public Media at its upcoming PitchBlack Awards in New York.

EXCLUSIVE: Veteran entertainment lawyer and business strategist Jason Beekman has exited his role as VP and Head of Business & Legal Strategy at RadicalMedia to join director and former Imagine Documentaries showrunner Ryan Miller in co-founding new production company, Wise Child Studios.

Peter Chernin’s spending continues.

Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman and late filmmaker Nancy Buirski will be honored at the Hamptons Doc Fest in New York next month.

Sony Picture Classics and Trafalgar Releasing have firmed up worldwide release plans for Carlos, their feature documentary on 10-time Grammy-winning musical icon, Carlos Santana.

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount’s Republic Pictures has acquired worldwide rights to the inspirational documentary Lift, from Academy Award-nominated filmmaker David Petersen, slating it for release via Paramount Global Content Distribution. In the U.S., the film will hit select theaters on September 15th and bow on digital on the 22nd. Pic will also soon hit the UK, debuting on digital on the 25th.

William Earl Variety and Rolling Stone have launched a digital content hub for the Truth Seekers Summit, presented by Showtime, featuring reporting that digs underneath the surface to reveal what’s hidden, what happened and what might come next. The hub, which features stories on documentaries of all genres by both outlets, will continue to update throughout the summit, which will take place in New York City and virtually on August 2, 2023.

Addie Morfoot Contributor The Better Angels Society, the Library of Congress, and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation have selected six finalists for the fifth annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film. Notably, veteran filmmaker Sam Pollard received two of the six noms.  The award, established in 2019, recognizes late-stage documentaries that use original research and a compelling narrative to tell stories that bring American history to life through archival materials. The six projects that were selected are: Barak Goodman’s “Buckley,” Nicole London’s “The Disappearance of Miss. Scott,” Sam Pollard’s “The Harvest,” Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn’s “Drop Dead City – New York on the Brink in 1975,” Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro’s “Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes,” and Jason Cohn’s “Modernism Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story.”

William Earl Variety and Rolling Stone have announced additional speakers and programming for the Truth Seekers Summit presented by Showtime, which will take place in New York City and virtually on Aug. 2. Newly added programming includes “The Art of Investigative Storytelling” panel, which will take a look at the creative minds behind breakout investigative and true crime storytelling. The panel will feature Tracy Pattin, co-producer and host, “Hollywood and Crime”; Shannon Evangelista, executive producer, “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace”; Sarah Amos, VP, development and production (non-fiction TV, documentaries), Condé Nast Entertainment and executive producer, “The Secrets of Hillsong”; and Mike Gasparro, executive producer, “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets” and “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.”

EXCLUSIVE: Longtime IFC Films and Cinetic Media PR colleagues Laura Sok and Kate McEdwards are launching new PR and strategy firm, Track Shot.

Flavio Gomez pmc-editorial-manager Variety and Rolling Stone return with their Truth Seekers Summit presented by SHOWTIME® on Aug. 2 in New York City, which will feature such headlining names as Rachel Maddow, Roy Wood, Jr., Dawn Porter and Liz Garbus. Maddow, host of the Emmy Award-winning “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, will be honored with the 2023 Variety and Rolling Stone Truth Seekers Award, recognizing her extensive accomplishments in journalism, followed by a Q&A about her experience in the news industry. “The Rachel Maddow Show” has won three Emmy Awards, and Maddow individually has received seven Emmy nominations honoring her in-depth and thorough take on the biggest stories of the day and week. Maddow has also written, produced and hosted three original podcasts for MSNBC – “Rachel Maddow Presents: Bag Man,” which won a DuPont Columbia Award and was nominated for a Peabody Award in 2020; “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra,” which received the first-ever Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism for a podcast in 2023; and, most recently, the six-episode series “Rachel Maddow Presents: Deja News,” which debuts June 12, 2023.

Baseball may be America’s most enduring professional sport, often referred to as a national pastime. And in his latest documentary, “MLK/FBI” director Sam Pollard examines an often overlooked chapter in baseball’s history: the Negro League.   READ MORE: Tribeca 2023 Festival: 20 Films To Watch “The League,” ready for its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month, celebrates the all-black league in all of its facets: from the entrepreneurs that created it to the legendary players like Satchel Paige, Buck O’Neil, as well as Hall of Famers like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, who made it what it was.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Corporate consolidation, along with shrinking publicity budgets and streaming services’ willingness to bury their own content, have made film festivals and series increasingly desirable to documentary filmmakers who are not only seeking distribution, but also to those nonfiction helmers who have found a platform for their work. The rocky landscape has made the competition fierce for a slot at not only top-tier festivals, but also regional film events like New York’s Rooftop Films’ Summer Series. Over the course of the last year, Rooftop Films president Dan Nuxoll received 3,500 film submissions for the nonprofit organization’s 27th annual Summer Series, which kicks off on May 25. Only 23 feature films and seven shorts were accepted. (Not all films have been announced.)

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired worldwide rights to “Carlos,” a feature-length documentary film about the father of Latin American jazz fusion and global icon, Carlos Santana, the company announced on Wednesday.The documentary is directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Rudy Valdez (“The Sentence,” “We Are: The Brooklyn Saints.”) Featuring never-before-seen or heard archival footage and music, the film offers an intimate and exhilarating look inside the mind of an elemental force of contemporary music and tell the incredible story of Santana’s life – from a fourteen-year-old street musician to a ten-time Grammy-winning and three-time Latin Grammy-winning global sensation.Jointly financed by Imagine Documentaries and Sony Music Entertainment, “Carlos” is produced by Sara Bernstein and Justin Wilkes along with Lizz Morhaim and executive produced by Academy Award-winning producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard for Imagine Documentaries. Leopoldo Gout, Ashley Kahn and Sam Pollard also serve as Producers.

Sony Pictures Classics has snapped up worldwide rights to Carlos, a new documentary about the father of Latin American jazz fusion, Carlos Santana. A release date for the film directed by Emmy winner Rudy Valdez (The Sentence) has not yet been disclosed.

The Peabody Awards said Thursday that Lily Tomlin has won the Peabody Career Achievement Award, and Issa Rae the Peabody Trailblazer Award. The honors will be bestowed during a ceremony for the 83rd annual Peabody Awards on June 11 in Los Angeles.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Tribeca Festival has announced the lineup of its 2023 festival, which includes new films from actors Chelsea Peretti and David Duchovny and documentaries about Rock Hudson and news anchor Dan Rather. This year’s event, which takes place from June 7-18, will feature 109 feature films from 127 filmmakers across 36 countries. There will be 93 world premieres, one international premiere, eight North American premieres, one U.S. premiere and six New York premieres. Among the lineup, there are offerings from 43 first-time directors and 29 directors returning to Tribeca with their latest projects. For the first time, more than half of feature films in competition (68%) are directed by women, while 41% (45) of all feature films are directed by women. Additionally, 36% (39) of feature films are directed by BIPOC filmmakers, including two indigenous filmmakers.

The 22nd edition of the Tribeca Festival unveiled a 2023 lineup with a record number of female helmers and heavy on films directed by actors like Chelsea Peretti’s First Time Female Director, John Slattery thriller Maggie Moore(s) with Tina Fey and Jon Hamm, David Duchovny’s Bucky F*cking Dent and Steve Buscemi’s The Listener.

EXCLUSIVE: The Gotham Film and Media Institute and HBO Documentary Films have set the inaugural cohort and mentors for their Documentary Development Initiative, first announced in June.

Diane Garrett On Friday, during the 18th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival, organizers unveiled a Diane Weyermann Fellowship at Points North Institute.Weyermann, the former chief content officer at Participant and former director of the Sundance Institute’s documentary film program, died last October of cancer.

EXCLUSIVE: Production is underway on a feature documentary from HBO Documentary Films and This Machine inspired by New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.

EXCLUSIVE: Six finalists were announced today for the richest prize in documentary film—the 4th Annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.

Sasha Urban editorMartin Luther King III will host a new docuseries produced by Calabasas Film and Media, the company announced Monday.Titled “Protect/Serve,” the series sees King, the oldest child of revered civil right activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., moderate a series of conversations with law enforcement officials, activists, grass-roots organization founders, DAs and other prominent figures. The conversations will focus on the role of police in America and the origins of institutional racism, with a goal of finding solutions to these problems.