Stream it: MLK/FBI

Sam Pollard has had an exceptional career telling stories about the Black experience. A producer on the PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize II and I’ll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community, Pollard has also worked on narrative film as an editor on the Spike Lee joints Mo' Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers, and Bamboozled. With Lee, Pollard also coproduced the documentaries Spike Lee Presents Mike Tyson, Four Little Girls, When The Levees Broke, and its follow-up, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise. As a documentary director, Pollard's work includes Slavery by Another Name, August Wilson: The Ground On Which I Stand, and Two Trains Runnin'. The latter film was presented at the Wex in March 2017 with a visit from the filmmaker.

With his new film, MLK/FBI, Pollard turns his attention to the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation to treat Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. like a dangerous domestic terrorist—with cooperation from the likes of Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Early reviews have called the doc "essential" and "incendiary"—a portrait more of the troubling mindset guiding the work of the FBI than of MLK or whatever may have been recorded on thousands of hours of surveillance tape.

MLK/FBI was just picked up by IFC Films for a release in January, but if you can't wait that long, the film is available for virtual viewing through Saturday via the New York Film Festival. NYFF organizer The Film Society of Lincoln Center also has a new interview with Pollard on its website.

Read an interview with MLK/FBI filmmaker Sam Pollard and buy a virtual ticket to watch the doc via filmlink.org.