Tag: documentaries

City of Refuge is a faith-based nonprofit organization that serves individuals facing some of life’s most difficult circumstances. A new documentary from Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Nick Nanton, The Greatest of These, tells the story of the nearly 30-year-old nonprofit and its founder, Bruce Deel.

Christalyn Hampton’s directorial career couldn’t have got off to a better start. Her debut as a filmmaker, The Devil is Busy, which she co-directed with Geeta Gandbhir, has been nominated for the Best Documentary Short Film at the 98th Academy Awards. Set at a women’s healthcare clinic in Atlanta, the film shows a day in the life of Tracii, its head of security. Atlanta magazine spoke with Hampton about the film, why documentaries are so important, and what she hopes the film's impact will be. 

Over the past 15 years, Dunwoody native Ryan White has established himself as one of the most entertaining and captivating documentary filmmakers working in American cinema. Come See Me in the Good Light has earned White his first Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. The film celebrates the life, work, career, and activism of Andrea Gibson, the late poet who garnered a legion of fans as a spoken-word artist. We spoke with White about how growing up in Atlanta inspired him to become a documentary filmmaker, his love for Southern stories, and his connection to Gibson’s poetry.

The strip club Magic City’s lore looms large. Now, timed to the storied strip club’s 40th anniversary, Starz is releasing a five-part docuseries called Magic City: An American Fantasy. It is executive produced by Jami Gertz, a co-owner of the Atlanta Hawks, and Jermaine Dupri. (Drake is also an executive producer.)

Like Atlanta’s unlikely journey to host the 1996 Centennial Olympics, for The Games in Black and White filmmakers George Hirthler and Bob Judson, the path to make the new documentary—premiering at the 49th annual Atlanta Film Festival Saturday, April 26 at the Rialto Theatre for the Arts—was equally long and complicated.

Hulu’s new original documentary Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told tells the story of how a 1983 picnic for Atlanta HBCU students in the meadow at Piedmont Park became, by the mid-1990s, a national Spring Break destination for hundreds of thousands of young people each April. Here’s five things highlighted in the new Hulu doc that even long-time Atlantans might not know about Freaknik’s enduring legacy.

The 90-minute feature film, directed by Ryon and Tyson Horne and written by AJC journalists Ernie Suggs and DeAsia Paige, had its world premiere Thursday night at Center Stage theater in Midtown and began streaming on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s website on Friday. The doc features exclusive interviews with T.I.; Jermaine Dupri; Arrested Development; Goodie Mob; DMC of Run DMC; Lil Yachty; Atlanta mayors Andrew Young, Kasim Reed, Keisha Lance Bottoms and Andre Dickens; Sleepy Brown; DJ Toomp; and many others.

The Georgia State University professor is tackling a story very close to home as writer and producer of a new documentary, The Harvest. Debuting September 12 on PBS’s The American Experience, The Harvest explores the story of first integrated public school class in Leland, Mississippi, of which Blackmon was a part of. The film is produced by prolific Oscar-nominated filmmaker and producer Sam Pollard (Citizen Ashe, Black Art: In the Absence of Light), who also worked on the documentary adaptation of Blackmon's Pulitzer-winning book, Slavery by Another Name.

The new 32-minute original documentary, produced by the Atlanta History Center under its new Atlanta History Center Originals banner, premiered Wednesday night at AHC and illustrates the history of the world’s largest confederate monument by tracking the timeline of its birth.

Publicly, Lil Baby has always been a man of few words. So it’s not at all surprising that the premiere screening of a documentary about the Atlanta rapper's life didn’t involve a grand speech. In fact, Lil Baby didn’t even offer a greeting or a goodbye on the microphone during the August 25 event. His gratitude was instead shown by the fact that he rented out the entire Regal movie theater at Atlantic Station and provided free refreshments throughout the night.