Rise and Rebuild
“Every time Black people built something, white folks tried to take it away.” The documentary Rise and Rebuild: A Tale of Three Cities portrays individuals in Atlanta, Chicago, and Wilmington, North Carolina who confront the historic destruction of Black wealth in their communities and devise strategies for building a more equitable future.
Tribeca Studios collaborated with acclaimed filmmakers Sam Pollard and Asako Gladsjo to create a feature documentary exploring the destruction of Black wealth in three cities: Atlanta, Wilmington, and Chicago. The film premiered at a custom event during Tribeca Festival in time for Juneteenth.
Objective
Generate exposure around advancing racial equality and economic opportunity.
Solutions & Outcomes
Produced Rise and Rebuild: A Tale of Three Cities, highlighting the filmmakers’ courageous storytelling, the subject’s passion and candor, and the brand’s support.
Held a private premiere event days before Juneteenth with pre-reception, Tribeca Studios CCO remarks, a post-screening panel including filmmakers and film subject, and brand activation touch-points throughout.
Created trailers to be amplified across O&O social channels for expanded reach in an effort to educate and engage a wider audience.
Sam Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television editor, and documentary producer/director whose work spans almost thirty years. His credits include Producer and Supervising Editor on the Spike Lee-directed HBO documentary If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise. Pollard also edited Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever and Bamboozled.
Pollard won two Emmys for When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and another for By the People: The Election of Barack Obama. He received an Oscar nomination in the documentary category for 4 Little Girls. In 2019, Pollard co-directed the six-part series Why We Hate, which premiered on Discovery Channel, and the 2020 HBO series Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children. His most recent film, MLK/FBI premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.
Leslie Asako Gladsjo is an award-winning documentary director, producer, and writer. Her recent credits include Why We Hate (Senior Producer), executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Alex Gibney for Discovery; (Un)Well (Director/Producer) for Netflix; By Whatever Means Necessary (Series Writer/Producer), executive produced by Forest Whitaker, Nina Yang Bongiovi, and Swizz Beatz for Epix; the Emmy-nominated PBS special Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise (Director/Series Producer); America by the Numbers (Director) for Maria Hinojosa and PBS; and Soundtracks: Songs that Made History (Producer) for CNN. She directed and senior produced the acclaimed six-hour PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates Jr., which won Emmy, DuPont, Peabody, and NAACP Image awards, as well as multiple seasons of the PBS Series Finding Your Roots and African American Lives.
In addition to her work in the United States, Gladsjo has directed and written many long-format documentaries on society, culture, race, and immigration for international broadcasters including Arte (Une Enfance Gay, Prier dans la Cité des Anges), BBC (Pandemonium), France 2 and France 5 (Peuples d’Ici, Français d’Ailleurs), Canal Plus, and others while based in Paris. Her independently-produced films – including Truth Under Siege and Stigmata: The Transfigured Body and a series of collaborations with the machine performance group Survival Research Laboratories – have won awards at national and international festivals. She teaches directing in the School of Visual Art’s MFA Program in Social Documentary.