It’s great to see an acclaimed veteran filmmaker really get their due, especially one in their ’70s. Now, in the documentary world, Sam Pollard is something of a household name. Starting out his career as an editor with Spike Lee, editing many of those classics, Pollard also produced many of Lee’s seminal documentaries and was nominated for an Oscar for 1997’s “Four Little Girls” and won a Peabody Award for Spike’s second Katrina doc “If God Is Willing And The Creek Won’t Rise.”
In 2020, the International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award, and right around this time, Pollard’s directing career—which had already been going strong since 1990—really took off with the success of “MLK/FBI” and “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children,” both doc and doc series showered with accolades and awards (Pollard is also a two-time Emmy winner with seven nominations total). If you’re interested in this doc legend, and you should be, you should listen to our podcast talk with him from last year.
Working at a super-fast clip at the moment, “Black Art: In the Absence of Light” and “Citizen Ashe” both coming out in 2021, Pollard has five more documentaries in the works currently, and his latest is “Lowndes County And The Road To Black Power.”
Co-directed with Geeta Gandbhir (“Black and Missing,” “Why We Hate”), “Lowndes County And The Road To Black” goes beyond the headlines by incorporating in-depth interviews with the men and women who were on the ground fighting for their human rights during this critical time in history. Archival footage transports audiences to 1960s Alabama, and the visuals are nothing short of stunning. An official selection of the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and a Critics Choice Documentary Awards nominee, the documentary is an eye-opening portrait of reclaiming freedom and agency and should be considered one of the definitive political documentaries of the year.
Here’s the official synopsis:
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 county with a vicious history of racist terrorism. In a county that was 80 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.
“Lowndes County And The Road To Black” will be released theatrically via Greenwich Entertainment on December 2 and will be available on Amazon and Apple TV+ the same day. Watch the first trailer below.
