Bill Russell: Legend – Director Sam Pollard

The remarkable life and legacy of an NBA superstar and civil rights icon is captured in the documentary Bill Russell: Legend. This two-part film  from award-winning director Sam Pollard features the last interview with Bill prior to his passing in 2022 as well as access to his sprawling personal archives. On the court, Russell went on to lead each and every one of his basketball teams to championships — two back-to-back NCAA titles, a gold medal at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, and 11 championship titles in his thirteen-year career as a Boston Celtic (his last two as the first Black head coach in NBA history). Off the court Russell was a force in the fight for human rights — marching with Martin Luther King Jr., leading boycotts in the NBA over racist practices and speaking out against segregation — efforts which earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Narrated by actors Jeffrey Wright and Corey Stoll and featuring exclusive interviews with the icon’s family and friends as well as Steph Curry, Chris Paul, “Magic” Johnson, Larry Bird, Jim Brown and more, Bill Russell: Legend illuminates the ways in which Russell stood tall in every sense of the word. Director Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power) joins us for a conversation on the player, the coach, the legend and the man who was one of the most influential figures in the history of sport and American civil society.

 

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Available on netflix.com/Bill Russell Legend

About the filmmaker – Sam Pollard is a veteran feature film and television video editor, and documentary producer/director. Between 1990 and 2010, he edited a number of Spike Lee films: Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers, and Bamboozled. Pollard and Lee co-produced a number of documentary productions for the small and big screen, including Four Little Girls, a feature-length documentary about the 1963 Birmingham church bombings which was nominated for an Academy Award® in 1998 and When The Levees Broke, a four-part documentary that won numerous awards, including a Peabody and three Emmy Awards. Five years later 2010 he co-produced and supervised the edit on the follow up, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise. As a producer/director, since 2015, his credits include: Slavery By Another Name, (2015) a 90-minute documentary for PBS that was in competition at the Sundance Festival; August Wilson: The Ground On Which I Stand, (2015) a 90-minute documentary for American Masters; Two Trains Runnin, a feature length documentary, which premiered at the Full Frame Film Festival in 2016; and Sammy Davis Jr., I’ve Gotta Be Me for American Masters premièred at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. In 2019, he co-directed the six-part series, Why We Hate, which premiered on The Discovery Channel. In 2020 he was one of the directors on the 2020 HBO Series Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children. also that year, he completed MLK/FBI,  which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and was also featured at the New York Film Festival. 

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“Russell talks about his childhood, his failures, his successes, his relationships, his activism, and his final thoughts on his life and career. It’s personal, but without being too vulnerable, there is a strength and power to his story that makes him a fighter, and someone who wanted to improve and be the best he could be.” – Romey Norton, Ready, Steady, Cut