Bay Street Theater & Sag Harbor Center for the Arts, in partnership with Southampton African American Museum, present a special online presentation of “Martin Luther King Jr: A Personal Portrait” on Thursday, March 25, at 8 PM via Zoom.
Following the screening, Emmy Award-winning cinematographer George Silano, who filmed the footage over the course of a week in December 1965, will join Brenda Simmons of the museum for a Q&A.
“Martin Luther King Jr: A Personal Portrait” is an intimate and candid glimpse at the life of America’s great Civil Rights leader, at a high point in his work and the Civil Rights Movement. Filmed in his Atlanta home over the course of that week in 1965, the documentary introduces Dr. King shortly following his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize and the passage of the The Civil Rights Act.
Dr. King speaks openly with the film’s producer, journalist Arnold Michaelis, about his position within the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the notion of sacrificing one’s own life in the fight for a higher cause. The film includes rare footage of a discussion with King’s wife, Coretta, who provides her own unique perspective of their home life and his activism.
Michaelis had hired Silano as a freelance cinematographer. Silano would later rediscover the footage in 2012 in the archives of the University of Georgia, where the film had been kept following Michaelis’ death in 1997.
Silano, who lives in North Haven, is an Emmy Award-winning cinematographer and photographer whose career has spanned fifty years. In addition to his work on “Martin Luther King Jr.: A Personal Portrait,” he worked on a number of feature length documentaries, including “The City of Ships,” “Changing World,””The Hippie Temptation,” and “What Do You Say To A Naked Lady?”
Born and raised in Southampton, Simmons is founder and executive director of the Southampton African American Museum, located in a former restaurant and barbershop dating to the late 1940s, a place well known as “The Gathering Place” for Blacks at that time. She is also founder of the Pyrrhus Concer Action Committee, which was formed to preserve the homestead of Pyrrhus Concer, a former indentured servant, legendary whaler, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who was born in Southampton Village in 1814.
Tickets are free at baystreet.org, and registration is required.