2022 PENNEBAKER CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD TO SAM POLLARD
GALA evening, SAT, 12/3, at BAY STREET THEATER
$50 Ticket
If seats are still available, tickets may be purchased at the festival desk. Cash or Credit cards only
7:00 Cocktail and Buffet Reception
8:00 Pennebaker Tribute Award; Julie Anderson interview with Sam Pollard on his monumental career as chronicler of the black experience in America.
9:00 Film screening: Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power
Sam Pollard is a veteran feature film and television editor, and documentary producer/director. With a career spanning 50 years, describing the essence and impact of his thoughtful, stellar body of work—be it as editor, director, or producer—is a true challenge. The New York Times called him “a multi-hyphenate artist who has quietly built a monumental career” exploring the contours and nuances of social hierarchies and human behavior. A dedicated, inquisitive chronicler of the Black Experience in America, his work has garnered multiple Peabody and Emmy Awards, and an Academy Award nomination. He has been honored with a 2021 New York Film Festival Tribute and a 2021 Career Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association.
“When I think about his documentaries, they add up to a corpus — a way of telling African-American history in its various dimensions,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University scholar, literary critic, and producer of two of Pollard’s films.
Between 1990 and 2010, Pollard, a generous collaborator with a sharp, skillful eye, edited several Spike Lee Films: Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers and Bamboozled. He and Lee co-produced a few documentaries for the small and big screen, including Four Little Girls, about the 1963 Birmingham church bombings which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1998 and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2005) which won numerous awards, including a Peabody and three Emmy Awards. Five years later in 2010, he co-produced and supervised the edit on the film’s follow-up, If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise.
As a producer/director, since 2015, his credits include: Slavery by Another Name for PBS which was in competition at the Sundance Festival; August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand for American Masters; Two Trains Runnin’ which premiered at Full Frame Film Festival; and Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me for American Masters, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. In 2019, he co-directed the six-part series, Why We Hate, which premiered on The Discovery Channel. In 2020, he was one of the directors on the HBO series, Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children. Also that year, he completed MLK/FBI, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and was featured at the New York Film Festival. In 2021, he directed Citizen Ashe, which premiered at Telluride.
Pollard has served on advisory committees for the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Independent Television Service (ITVS). He has been a film professor at NYU for close to 30 years.
On a personal note, Sam has been a true friend to the festival. His enthusiasm and dedication to his craft, his unique affinity for collaboration, his commitment to mentorship and passing on what he has learned in his long and illustrious career is an inspiration to us all.
Hamptons Doc Fest has had the honor of showing five of Sam’s films:
• Sammy Davis Jr.: I Gotta Be Me—Winner, Filmmaker’s Choice Award 2015
• MLK/FBI—Opening Night Film 2020
• Black Art: In the Absence of Light—Special screening with the Parrish Art Museum 2020
• Citizen Ashe—Winner, Audience Award 2021
• Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power—on receiving the Pennebaker Career Achievement Award 2022