Tag: documentaries

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.

Because the documentary explores John Lewis’s life, it is also, by necessity, a contemplation of heroism and sacrifice, by people like him who came from the humblest of origins.

At some point every journalist comes across a story that deserves more space and attention than the assignment permits. For Camille Pendley, that story was the plight of the residents of Vine City and English Avenue, two of the city’s poorest neighborhoods—which sit across the street from the country’s newest and grandest cathedral to sports, the Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

Comprised of archive footage from the MTV Vaults, this film follows Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Michael Stipe from playing in an abandoned Athens church to the breakthrough of their 1983 record Murmur to their breakup in 2011, with plenty of performances in between.