In 2003 Encounters held a number of workshops, two of which became a platform for examining personal identity, the legacy of apartheid’s racial classifications and the opportunities available to filmmakers in post-apartheid South Africa. The consensus, perception, was that white filmmakers make films about both whites and blacks and that black filmmakers make films about blacks only. Black filmmakers do not make films about whites only – slegs blankes.
And so Black on White was conceived – a series of 50 minute documentaries to be made by black filmmakers about whites – as part of the Close Encounters Documentary Laboratory.
Black on White is a partnership between SABC1, Encounters, Fuzebox Productions and O-dacity Films
The six filmmakers, and their films, selected for the Laboratory are:
- Sipho Singiswa – Inja Yomlungu
- Omelga Mthiyane – Different Pigment
- Yunus Vally – The Glow of White Women
- Khadija Magardie – Black Girls Spit, White Girls Swallow
- Vincent Moloi – Men of Gold
- Rehad Desai – The Heart of Whiteness
Sam Pollard will act as the Head Trainer for the Black on White Laboratory sessions. Sam Pollard’s accomplishments, as a feature film and video editor, a documentary producer and director, span almost thirty years. His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 on Henry Hampton’s series Eyes On The Prize II. He received an Emmy for one episode. As co-executive producer/producer of Hampton’s last documentary series I’ll Make Me A World, Sam received The George Peabody Award.
He edited a number of Spike Lee’s films: Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers and Bamboozled. Sam and Spike Lee also co-produced documentaries including Spike Lee Presents Mike Tyson, for which Sam received an Emmy, and Four Little Girls which was nominated for an Academy Award. Sam is currently a Professor in Film Studies at New York University Tisch School of the Arts.
