Renowned director Orlando Bagwell will screen and discuss his powerful new feature length documentary film “Citizen King,” which explores the last five years in Martin Luther King’s life by drawing on the personal recollections and eyewitness accounts of friends, activists, journalists, and law enforcement officers. The film casts new light on a little-known chapter in the story of one of America’s most important and influential moral leaders. While the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech is seen as a high point in the public career of Martin Luther King Jr., it was also a turning point in his personal life, as he embarked on a controversial, often lonely struggle to redefine and redirect the movement he had helped create.
Orlando Bagwell’s extraordinary range of work in documentary extends over nearly two decades. Widely regarded as the as the preeminent documentary chronicler of American pluralism, his credits include “Eyes On Prize,” “Malcolm X: Make it Plain,” “Africans In America,” “Hymn To Alvin Ailey,” and this year’s PBS series “Matters of Race.”