By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
A new documentary explores the FBI’s relentless surveillance and harassment of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
The Sam Pollard documentary relies on recently declassified files, interviews and archival imagery of the civil rights movement.
“We felt it was important to really look at how King was looked at from the perspective of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, that they considered him a very dangerous man,” Pollard tells The Hollywood Reporter. “They were going at him by any means necessary to destroy him. At the same time, we wanted to convey King’s trajectory as we see the FBI is really digging into him, wiretapping, bugging his hotel rooms, and finding out that he was not a monogamous man.”
Pollard, who is known for editing Spike Lee films, said he sees a parallel between the civil rights movement a half century ago and the Black Lives Matter movement today.
The documentary will make its world premiere at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.
