Black Trailblazers

PEOPLE HAVE A WAY of celebrating those who are the first to reach the top of the mountain without necessarily acknowledging the struggle they endured along the way. For Black pioneers in documentary filmmaking, their ascent often meant climbing solo with little support. POV reached out to award-winning filmmakers Selwyn Jacob, Sam Pollard, and Sylvia D. Hamilton to learn about some of the adversities that they had to overcome when embarking on their filmmaking journeys.

Working in film had long been a dream of Canadian filmmaker and producer Selwyn Jacob when he was a young boy growing up in Trinidad. Little did he know that all it would take was a magazine cover, featuring a Black man who had gone to the University of Southern California (USC) film school, to make his once cloudy path to filmmaking become clearer.

Travelling to Alberta to get his undergraduate degree in education, Jacob eventually went to USC in the mid-’70s, where he was one of two Black students in the film program. “I was 50% of the program” Jacob remembers, “so in terms of mentorship, there wasn’t anything.” He had to forge through the unfamiliar terrain on his own, making contacts any way he could. Jacob chased after guest speakers, like pioneer African-American actor Roscoe Lee Browne, in hopes of getting their contact information and conversing with them. Thanks to a Black woman who worked at the school’s film library, Jacob found another networking avenue, which allowed him to meet legendary filmmaker Robert Wise, who agreed to let him visit the