The Latino List: Volume 1 Click here to Buy this Film The Latino List: Volume 1, highlights some of today’s most accomplished and influential Latinos. They share their personal stories, struggles and triumphs as Latinos in America. The film, which follows The Black List series, also premiered on HBO. Subjects in Volume 1 are: Sandra Cisneros, Gloria and Emilio Estefan, America Ferrera, Jose Hernandez, Consuelo Castillo Kickbusch, John Leguizamo, Eva Longoria, Senator Bob Menendez, Pitbull, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Anthony Romero, Eddie “Piolin Sotelo, Sonia Sotomayor, Julie Stav and Dr. Marta Moreno Vega. The defining premise of The Latino List is deceptively simple - identify participants that span a broad array of fields—culture, politics, business, and sports—reveal the richness and diversity of Latino life in America. The illuminating interviews taken as a whole provide a challenging framework to help think about the meaning of race today. The revelation [...]

The Black List: Volume 3 The Black List: Volume 3, the final in the trilogy of films, includes Lee Daniels, Whoopi Goldberg, Hill Harper, Beverly Johnson, Debra Lee, John Legend, Dr. Michael Lomax, and LaTanya Richardson. Cynthia Fuchs, of PopMatters writes - Volume Three‘s explanations are more cursory than sustained. Still, a couple of interviews make strong and important points about the ways race inflects daily life in America. Michael Lomax, president and chief executive officer of the United Negro College Fund of the United States, notes “the kind of internal inconsistency in our community,” that is, the celebrations of achievements that must repress or ignore difficult truths or experiences that might be taken out of context. So, he admires his mother, a journalist who took risks to report on the Civil Rights Movement in the South, and his grandfather, who made a fortune as a numbers [...]

The Black List: Volume 2 The Black List: Volume 2 premiered on HBO in February 2009. The fifteen subjects interviewed for the film also come from a vast and different collection of disciplines that draw from the worlds of the arts, politics, religion, and entertainment. This group features Angela Davis, Bishop Barbara Harris, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Charley Pride, Dr. Valerie Montgomery-Rice, Governor Deval Patrick, Kara Walker, Lawrence Fishburne, Majora Carter, Maya Rudolph, Melvin Van Peebles, Patrick Robinson, Rza, Suzanne De Passe, and Tyler Perry. For Blackbook.com, Eiseley Tauginas talked to Angela Davis and wrote, “This month, with a slew of black heroes -- from fearless artist Kara Walker to empire-maker Tyler Perry – Angela Davis is interviewed in the second installment of the groundbreaking HBO documentary The Black List. What do you hope audiences will take away from The Black List: Volume Two? After having seen the [...]

The Black List: Volume 1 The Black List: Volume 1, the first film in this trilogy, premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2008 and aired on HBO in August of that year. In 2009, it won the NAACP Spirit award best documentary. The film works as a series of living portraits, twenty-three prominent African Americans of various professions, disciplines and backgrounds offer their own stories and insights on the struggles, triumphs and joys of black life in this country and manage to re-define “blacklist” for a new century in the process. Subjects speak directly to the camera as they tell their stories. Those interviewed for the film are: Bill T. Jones, Chris Rock, Colin Powell, Dawn Staley, Faye Wattleton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Lorna Simpson, Louis Gossett, Jr., Mahlon Duckett, , Marc Morial, Rev. Al Sharpton, Richard D. Parsons, Russell Simmons, Sean Combs, Serena Williams, Slash, [...]

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am TONI: THE PIECES I AM, offers an artful and intimate meditation on the life and works of legendary storyteller Toni Morrison and the powerful themes she has brought to American literature. From the steel mills of Lorain, OH to 70s-era book tours with Mohammed Ali, from the front lines with Angela Davis to her own riverfront writer’s room, Toni Morrison leads a collection of her peers, critics and colleagues on an exploration of race, America, history and the human condition as seen through the prism of her own literature. Inspired to write because no one took a “little black girl” seriously, Toni Morrison reflects on the “white male gaze” and her lifelong deconstruction of the master narrative.  Woven together with a rich collection of art, history, literature and personality, the feature-length documentary film includes discussions about her many critically acclaimed works, including novels [...]

Lou Reed: "Rock and Roll Heart" 1999 Winner of Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video. Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart traces the life and career of the legendary singer-songwriter Lou Reed, from 1965, through college, the Velvet Underground, and into his solo career. Filmed in Greenfield-Sanders’ intimate portrait style, the film also includes 1990s poetry readings and footage from Reed’s theater collaboration, “Time Rocker”, with Robert Wilson. Remarkable concert footage is intercut with over two-dozen interview subjects. With a transfer from video to 16mm, this film mixes black-and-white and color. Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ friendship with Reed started in 1992 at a photo shoot. This shoot led to an album cover collaboration, and soon thereafter, Reed permitted Greenfield-Sanders to film behind-the-scenes footage. With 50 hours of footage, Greenfield-Sanders sought advice from American Masters’ founder, Susan Lacy. Lacy immediately said, “Lou Reed is an American Master. We’ve [...]

About Face: Supermodels Then and Now ABOUT FACE: Supermodels, Then and Now A DOCUMENTARY FOR HBO BY TIMOTHY-GREENFIELD SANDERS Click here to Buy this Film “About Face” reunites fashion’s legendary models and examines their lives, careers, and lifelong relationship with beauty. From youth to cosmetic surgery, addiction to self-esteem, overnight stardom to reinvention, this HBO documentary reveals the extraordinary women behind the famous faces. Shot in Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' intimate portrait style, “About Face” highlights the women whose images defined our sense of beauty from the 1940’s through the 1980’s. “About Face” features Carol Alt, Marisa Berenson, Karen Bjornson, Christie Brinkley, Pat Cleveland, Carmen Dell’Orefice, Jerry Hall, Bethann Hardison, Beverly Johnson, China Machado, Paulina Porizkova, Isabella Rossellini and Lisa Taylor. The film also includes special appearances by Kim Alexis, Nancy Donahue, Esme, Eileen Ford, Dayle Haddon, Cheryl Tiegs, Christy Turlington and Calvin Klein. QUOTES FROM THE FILM "They [...]

The Out List A diverse cross-section of Americans share personal and professional stories, both heart-wrenching and triumphant, of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer experience in The Out List. CLICK HERE TO BUY DVD Through this series of intimate interviews, LGBT personalities both known and unknown bring color and depth to their experiences of sexuality, gender expression, and identity. With wit and wisdom, this set of trailblazing individuals weaves universal themes of love, loss, trial, and triumph into the determined struggle for full equality. Activist and actor, politician and provocateur, drag queen, and athlete all share personal stories that set them apart and tie them together, revealing a poignant, familiar journey to find themselves and secure a place in modern society. The subjects in The Out List are celebrated not just for being “out” and visible in their own lives, but also because they share a [...]

The Boomer List Wikipedia describes ‘baby boomers’ as people born between the years 1946 and 1964, during the Post–World War II baby boom. Widely referenced in a cultural context, baby boomers are associated with a redefinition of traditional values. The most affluent and active generation up to that time, baby boomers were the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. A unique generation, baby boomers are vastly different from preceding periods in terms of their ingenuous rhetoric. Civil rights, women's rights, LGBT rights, the peace movement, and the green movement all came into being with the boomer generation. Boomers are also noted for their remarkable advances in the arts and entertainment; science; law; politics; public service; sports; the military and technology. In the 1960s, as millions of Americans became teenagers and young adults, boomers created a progressive, initially rebellious "counter culture" that [...]

The Women's List With an introduction written and read by Toni Morrison, "American Masters:  The Women's List" is an engaging, beautifully shot oral history of 50 years of women's equality, told through 15 candid tableaus by the women who lived them.  These women are feminism's starting lineup and its pinch hitters; those who became household names and those who quietly blazed a trail. Produced as part of PBS' "American Masters" series, " The Women's List" joins prior "List" documentaries shot by  filmmaker and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, whose style -- more cinematic portraiture than documentary -- lends a conversational, intimate tone to themes that may otherwise feel abstract.   Amanda Duberman, The Huffington Post.  If there were a way to take a film and bottle it so it could be sipped quietly in moments of frustration, fatigue, failure or fear for a little dose of courage, calmness or confidence, [...]