Community Corner: Hindsight Film Festival presents FREE screening of ‘The Disappearance of Miss Scott', a PBS American Masters film

This Friday, June 6, a film documenting the life of jazz virtuoso and civil rights pioneer Hazel Scott will be screened in Savannah.It also marks the debut of a new film festival making its way to the Hostess City next year.Patrick Longstreth is the director of Hindsight Film Fest.He sat down with WSAV's Kim Gusby in today's Community Corner to talk about the project an its purpose.
Click the arrow in the video box above to watch the interview.
Many people may be familiar with Longstreth's work. He is the director of 'The Day that Shook Georgia', a documentary that tells the story of one of the worst industrial tragedies in US history.
The Hindsight Film Festival will present a free screening of 'The Disappearance of Miss Scott', a PBS American Masters film. The film tells the story of Hazel Scott, the first Black American to have her own television show. Scott was also an early civil rights pioneer who faced down the Red Scare at the risk of losing her career and was a champion for equality.
Immediately following the film there will be a Q&A with Emmy Award winning director Nicole London and Adam Clayton Powell III, a journalist and the son of Hazel Scott and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African American to be elected to Congress from New York in 1945.
The event is co-sponsored by The Better Angels Society (Ken Burns Prize for Film) and CinemaSavannah.
'The Disappearance of Miss Scott'Friday, June 67 pm, Doors open at 6Otis S. Johnson Cultural CenterFREE!
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Boston Globe

18 hours ago

• Boston Globe

William Cran, ‘Frontline' documentarian, is dead at 79

He began his career with the BBC, but he mostly worked as an independent producer, toggling between jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. He was most closely associated with WGBH's 'Frontline,' for which he produced 20 documentaries on a wide range of subjects -- some historical, like the four-part series 'From Jesus to Christ' (1998) and 'The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover' (1993), and some focused on current events, including 'Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch' (1995). Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up He won a slew of honors, including four Emmys, four duPont-Columbia University awards, two Peabodys, and an Overseas Press Club Award. Advertisement In 1986, he produced 'The Story of English,' an Emmy-winning nine-episode series for the BBC and PBS about how English became the world's dominant language. He, with journalists Robert MacNeil, the PBS news anchor, and Robert McCrum, turned it into a book. Mr. Cran produced two multipart documentaries based on books by historian Daniel Yergin: 'The Prize' (1990), a Pulitzer-winning history of oil, and 'The Commanding Heights' (1998, with Joseph Stanislaw), about the history of the modern global economy. Advertisement These were complicated stories, but Mr. Cran was able to frame them around characters and narrative threads that kept viewers engaged over several nights. 'I learned from him that less is more, that the script is not a shortened version of the book, but rather captions to go with the picture,' Yergin wrote in an email. 'He always stuck to the facts, but he always wanted dramatic tension.' Both documentaries were well-received, despite their potentially dry material. 'Using every familiar element of the documentarian's art, producer-director William Cran has created a masterpiece,' The Washington Post wrote of 'The Commanding Heights.' William Cran was born Dec. 11, 1945, in Hobart, on the island state of Tasmania, Australia. His mother, Jean (Holliday) Cran, was a teacher, and his father, John, was a science lecturer. The family moved to London when William was 6. He studied classics at Oxford, and though he knew early on that he wanted to make documentaries, he also dabbled in theater, directing two plays in London. After graduating in 1968, he became a trainee at the BBC, where he rose to producer, using then-novel techniques such as reconstructed scenes, and pursuing new genres including true crime. One early documentary was '1971 Luton Postmaster Murder,' about two men who were wrongly convicted of killing a British postmaster. But Mr. Cran grew tired of being what he called a 'company man,' and left the BBC after eight years. He moved to Toronto in 1976, becoming a senior producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s investigative news program 'The Fifth Estate.' Two years later, David Fanning, an executive at WGBH in Boston, reached out to him about a documentary program he was creating called 'World.' Advertisement Mr. Cran flew to Boston for a meeting -- and got stuck in the blizzard of 1978. While holed up at Fanning's home, the two cooked up an idea for Mr. Cran's first documentary for the program, 'Chachaji: My Poor Relation,' a story of modern India told through the family of writer Ved Mehta. 'What was particular about Bill is that each one of his films is different,' Fanning said in an interview, adding, 'He would do these surprising things. He would say: 'I think I want to build a set. I want to build a bedroom in the studio.'' Fanning trusted Mr. Cran so much that in 1983, when 'World' was rebranded as 'Frontline,' with a tighter focus on current events, he asked Mr. Cran to produce its first two documentaries, with the first about corruption in the NFL. The next 'Frontline' subject, '88 Seconds in Greensboro,' probed the 1979 deaths of five people after a pro-communist march was attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party in North Carolina. Four local camera crews had filmed the bloodshed. Mr. Cran and his team 'edited the combined footage into an amazingly complete anatomy of a murder,' wrote TV reviewer David Bianculli in the Akron Beacon Journal. In 1993, Mr. Cran led a 'Frontline' documentary team that looked into possible abuses and compromises by the longtime FBI director in 'The Secret File on J. Edgar Hoover.' The four-part series built a case that Hoover, who led the agency (and its forerunner) from 1924 to 1972, potentially made concessions to organized crime and other groups to avoid public disclosures of his gay relationships. Advertisement 'Our investigation found that this master of political blackmail was wide open to blackmail himself,' Mr. Cran said. 'There is overwhelming evidence that the mob knew it had nothing to fear from Hoover's FBI.' One of Mr. Cran's most historically expansive documentaries, the series 'From Jesus to Christ' (1998), took shape after Fanning met with a WGBH producer, Marilyn Mellowes, who was working on a documentary to bring more cultural and political context to the life of Jesus and the New Testament. Fanning agreed to bring aboard additional resources, including Mr. Cran as a senior producer and director. 'We make no judgment about faith, and we make no judgments about divinity,' Fanning told journalists. The documentary framed the life of Jesus in the wider realities of Roman-controlled Galilee, described by scholars as a center of Jewish resistance and activism. Jesus, meanwhile, was not raised amid a pastoral idyll - as portrayed in some accounts - but mingled with people from across the Roman world and was probably well aware of the political foment around him, the documentary suggested. Mr. Cran's first marriage, to Araminta Wordsworth, ended in divorce. His second wife, Stephanie Tepper, who worked with him as a producer on several films, died in 1997. His third wife, Polly Bide, died in 2003. He married Vicki Barker, a CBS journalist, in 2014. She survives him, as do three daughters from his second marriage, Jessica, Rebecca and Chloe Cran; his sister, Vicki Donovan; and a granddaughter. Many of Mr. Cran's films continue to be watched. 'Two months ago,' Yergin said, 'I was walking up Madison Avenue and someone -- out of the blue, startled to see me -- stopped me to say that watching 'Commanding Heights' had changed his life.' Advertisement Material from The Washington Post was used in this obituary.

New York Post

3 days ago

• New York Post

Pope Leo XIV has scads of famous cousins — including Madonna, Justin Bieber and more

From Holy See to Hollywood. A noted historian dug into Pope Leo XIV's family tree, discovering it includes a who's who of A-list celebrities, political figures and even a famous novelist. Harry Louis Gates Jr., longtime host of PBS' 'Finding Your Roots,' a docuseries that explores the ancestry of noteworthy people, recently collaborated with genealogists at the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami and American Ancestors and traced the new pontiff's family history back to the 1500s, making some unexpected discoveries. 3 Pope Leo XIV became the first American pontiff on May 8. AP For starters, Leo XIV comes from a strikingly diverse background, with ancestors born all around the world, from France, Italy, Spain and the US to Cuba, Canada, Haiti and Guadeloupe, an archipelago nation in the eastern Caribbean. The pope also has at least 17 black relatives, including his grandfather, Joseph Nerval Martínez, who was born in Haiti. Leo XIV also had a dozen ancestors who were slaveholders, eight of whom were black. Pope Leo XIV's ascent to the papacy was historical significance partly due to him being the first pontiff to hail from North America, and his ancestry includes a number of household names from the continent. He's ninth cousins — many times removed — with superstars including Madonna, Justin Bieber and Angelina Jolie, as well as Hillary Clinton and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 3 Pop icon Madonna is one of Pope Leo XIV's famous cousins. AFP via Getty Images Rounding out his roster of famous cousins is 'On the Road' author Jack Kerouac. Pope Leo XIV, 70, became pontiff May 9 after just two days and four rounds of voting by the College of Cardinals at the Vatican. 3 Pope Leo XIV is ninth cousins, many times removed, with singer Justin Bieber. GC Images He is the 267th pope in the history of the Roman Catholic church, and follows Pope Francis, 88, who died April 21 after battling respiratory illness culminating in a stroke and heart failure.

San Francisco Chronicle​

5 days ago

• San Francisco Chronicle​

Review: Disney, Pixar's ‘Elio' channels '80s nostalgia and science in new adventure

Elio, the cheeky moppet at the center of Pixar's latest animated confection, could have been inspired by any child of the 1980s. Astronomer Carl Sagan is his muse, and as he peers at the stars through his telescope he dreams of faraway places and wonders if we are alone in the universe. We are not. At least not in ' Elio,' in which a grieving, lonely boy improbably becomes Earth's representative in a galactic dispute. The movie's '80s vibe extends beyond references to Sagan, the planetary scientist whose PBS limited series 'Cosmos' became a phenomenon, back when the national public broadcaster was fully funded and not a target in the culture wars. In fact, 'Elio' would fit perfectly on the Blockbuster shelf (if the video rental chain was still around) next to other '80s kid-powered movies such as 'The Goonies,' 'Explorers' and of course 'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.' The title of the animated film itself is a nod to that era, with screenwriters Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones naming Elio afterElliott, the boy played by Henry Thomas in Steven Spielberg's classic. When the movie opens, Elio (voiced with depth and sensitivity by Yonas Kibreab) is mourning the recent deaths of his parents. He is taken in by his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who is in the U.S. Air Force Space Command tracking junk debris in space. But Olga finds Elio to be a handful, and the boy feels lost and alone. His imagination is sparked by a planetarium show about the Voyager space probe, with narration by Sagan, and begins to long to be abducted by aliens. He spends hours on the beach drawing messages in the sand that he hopes the aliens will see. One evening while on the base with his aunt, Elio overhears one of the technicians say he thinks he has intercepted an alien transmission. The boy sneaks into the command center and contacts the aliens, and soon he is transported across the galaxy to a place called the Communiverse that seems like a Mad magazine parody of ' Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.' Elio is mistaken as the leader of Earth, and tries to mediate a dispute between the war-like Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) and the population of the Communiverse while simultaneously striking up a friendship with the lord's son Glordon (Remy Edgerly). Directed by the Oscar-winning Domee Shi (' Turning Red '), Alameda native Madeline Sharafian and Adrian Molina (' Coco '), the visually appealing 'Elio' moves confidently and delicately handles themes of isolation, grief, family strife and friendship. And Sagan provides the coda, so it's not just the children in the audience who are transported to another time and place, but the adults as well.