A truly inspiring story about the famous tennis player and activist Arthur Ashe, who won Wimbledon, the US Open and Australian Open and was also the first Black player selected to represent America in the Davis Cup. Off the court, he waged his personal war for freedom for all, equality and respect for otherness, and did so at a time when each such action required incredible courage and predefined priorities. In Citizen Ashe, described by 'The Hollywood Reporter' as a poignant tribute to a Black player who broke barriers in an all-white world, directors Rex Miller and Sam Pollard focus on the tennis player's social work and evolution of his activism, culminating in his premature death of AIDS at the age of just 49. The film is executive produced by John Legend and Alex Gibney (We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, The Armstrong Lie) and premiered at the Telluride Festival.
Nominated in 1998 for an Oscar (with Spike Lee) for 4 Little Girls, Sam Pollard is an American documentary filmmaker, producer, editor and screenwriter. He has won nearly 30 awards for his films and more than twice as many nominations, including an Emmy for By the People: The Election of Barack Obama and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. He has made films for HBO, PBS and Discovery.
2008 Amerykańskie doświadczenia / American Experience (doc.)
2019 Why We Hate (doc.)
2020 FBI kontra Martin Luther King / MLK/FBI (doc.)
2021 Obywatel Ashe / Citizen Ashe (doc.)
Rex Miller is a cinematographer, producer and director. He won an Emmy for A Chef's Life in 2013. For 15 years he has been making films for HBO, together with Nanfu Wang, Sam Pollard and Steven Cantor, as well as for PBS and the Tennis Channel. His photographs have been published in „The New York Times”, „Rolling Stone” and „Time”, among others.
2008 Somay Ku: A Uganda Tennis Story (doc.)
2014 Althea (doc.)
2018 Ashe ’68 (short)
2021 Obywatel Ashe / Citizen Ashe (doc.)