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Black Public Media is excited to celebrate Mr. Pollard’s remarkable work through a series of in-person screenings and online streaming events. In partnership with organizations across the country, in-person screenings will take place in Los Angeles on April 27, Baltimore on May 3, and in New York City April 11-21.
Additionally, we will offer a limited online streaming window from April 22 to May 5. To gain access, attendees must register for the Sam Pollard Film Retrospective. All screening tickets are free. To register and learn more about PitchBLACK, visit this page.
Co-presented by the Queens Underground Film Festival
Hosted by Santa Monica College, Center for Media Design and BADWest
Hosted by UC Santa Barbara
Style Wars is an American 1983 documentary film on hip hopculture, directed by Tony Silver and produced in collaboration with Henry Chalfant. The film has an emphasis on graffiti, although bboying and rapping are covered to a lesser extent. The film was originally aired on the television network PBS and was subsequently shown in several film festivals to much acclaim, including the Vancouver Film Festival. It also won the Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.
The show captures and includes many historical moments of hip hop culture during its earliest days in the 1970s onward towards the early 1980s. Many film elements from Style Wars, including outtakes, are now housed at the Academy Film Archive as part of the Tony Silver Collection.
Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement is an American television series and 14-part documentary about the 20th-century civil rights movement in the United States. The documentary originally aired on the PBS network, and it also aired in the United Kingdom on BBC2. Created and executive produced by Henry Hampton at his film production company Blackside, and narrated by Julian Bond, the series uses archival footage, stills, and interviews by participants and opponents of the movement. The title of the series is derived from the title of the folk song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize“, which is used as the opening theme music in each episode.
Episode 2 – Two Societies
Northern cities served as the backdrop for confrontations on a scale the civil rights movement had never seen before the mid-1960s. Scarred by widespread discrimination, black inner-city neighborhoods became sites of crumbling houses, poverty, and street violence. Although the black-led movement for social change and equality in the North had a long history, it had not received the same media attention the struggle in the South had.
Episode 5 – Ain’t Gonna Shuffle No Mo
Call to pride and push for unity galvanize blacks. Cassius Clay challenges America to accept him as Muhammad Ali, who refuses to fight in Vietnam. Students at Howard University fight to bring the growing black consciousness movement and their African heritage inside the walls of the institution.
4 Little Girls is a 1997 American historical documentary film about the murder of four African-American girls (Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Rosamond Robertson) in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. The film was directed by Spike Lee and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary.
The events inspired the 1964 song Birmingham Sunday by Richard and Mimi Fariña, which was used in the opening sequence of the film, as sung by Joan Baez, Mimi’s sister. They also inspired the 1963 tune Alabama by John Coltrane, which is also included in the soundtrack. 4 Little Girls premiered on June 25, 1997, at the Guild 50th Street Theatre in New York City. It was produced by Lee’s production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, and Home Box Office (HBO).
In 2017, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Bamboozled is a 2000 American satirical black comedy-drama film written and directed by Spike Lee about a modern televised minstrel show featuring black actors donning blackface makeup and the resulting violent fallout from the show’s success.
The film was given a limited release by New Line Cinema during the fall of 2000 and was released on DVD the following year. Critical reception was mixed, and the film was unsuccessful financially, becoming a box office bomb. Despite its initial reception, Bamboozled later achieved cult film status for its satirical look at stereotypical depictions of black people in both historical and contemporary American film and television productions.
In 2023, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
The passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented not the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement, but the beginning of a new, crucial chapter. Nowhere was this next battle better epitomized than in Lowndes County, Alabama, a rural, impoverished town with a vicious history of racist terrorism. In a town that was eighty percent Black but had zero Black voters, laws were just paper without power. This isn’t a story of hope but of action. Through first-person accounts and searing archival footage, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power tells the story of the local movement and young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers who fought not just for voting rights, but for Black Power in Lowndes County.
Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes is a 2023 documentary film about the drummer, bandleader, and activist Max Roach. The film was directed by Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro, edited by Russell Greene, with cinematography by Shapiro. The film premiered at the 2023 South by Southwest Film Festival.