Conversation with editor Sam Pollard and filmmaker Roger Ross Williams + Series Kick-Off Party
Directed by Tony Silver and produced by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, it was awarded the Grand Prize for Documentaries at the 1983 Sundance Film Festival. Style Wars is regarded as the indispensable document of New York Street culture of the early ’80s, the filmic record of a golden age of youthful creativity that exploded into the world from a city in crisis.
Style Wars captured the look and feel of New York’s ramshackle subway system as graffiti writers’ public playground, battleground and spectacular artistic canvas. Opposing them by every means possible were Mayor Edward Koch, the police, and the New York Transit Authority. Meanwhile MCs, DJs and B-boys rocked the city with new sounds and new moves and street corner breakdance battles evolved into performance art.
New York’s legendary kings of graffiti and b-boys own a special place in the hip hop pantheon. Style Wars has become an emblem of the original, embracing spirit of hip hop as it reached out across the world from underground tunnels, uptown streets, clubs and playgrounds.
Style Wars was edited by Sam Pollard and co-edited Mary Alfieri with supervising editor Victor Kanefsky.
Following this screening and Q&A, we will have our BIPOC Doc Editors on the Big Screen Kick-Off Party! Admission to the party is included with a Style Wars ticket. If you are not attending Style Wars, please RSVP for the party here.
Sponsored by Adobe: 
Make sure to stop by the Adobe booth at the reception to chat with the team about your workflow needs and check out Text Based Editing – an entirely new way to edit in Premiere Pro.
Sam Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television video editor, and documentary producer/director. Between 1990 and 2010, Mr. Pollard edited a number of Spike Lee's films: Mo' Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers, and Bamboozled. Mr. Pollard and Mr. Lee co-produced a number of documentary productions for the small and big screen, Four Little Girls, a feature-length documentary about the 1963 Birmingham church bombings which was nominated for an Academy Award and When The Levees Broke, a four part documentary that won numerous awards, including a Peabody and three Emmy Awards. Five years later 2010 he co-produced and supervised the edit on the follow up to Levees If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise. Since 2012 Mr. Pollard has completed as a producer/director Slavery By Another Name a 90-minute documentary for PBS that was in competition at the Sundance Festival, August Wilson: The Ground On Which I Stand a 90-minute documentary in 2015 for American Masters, Two Trains Runnin’ a feature length documentary in 2016 that premiered at the Full Frame Film Festival. Sammy Davis Jr., I’ve Gotta Be Me for American Masters premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. In 2019 Mr. Pollard co-directed the Six Part Series Why We Hate that premiered on The Discovery Channel. In 2020 he was one of the directors on the 2020 HBO Series Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children. He also completed in 2020 MLK/FBI that premiered at the 2020 Toronto Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. In 2021 HBO premiered two of his films Black Art: In the Absence of Light and Citizen Ashe.
Roger Ross Williams is an Oscar, Emmy, NAACP Image award, Webby and Peabody award-winning director, producer and writer –and the first African American director to win an Academy Award ®, with his film Music By Prudence. Williams directed Life, Animated, which won him the Sundance directing award, and was nominated for an Academy Award ® and won three Emmys. Williams is the recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association, The Woodstock Film Festival Maverick Award, The NYU Alumni Achievement Award and an honorary doctorate from Lafayette College. His production company One Story Up produced the acclaimed food series High On The Hog, an adaptation of Ta Nehisi Coates’ Between The World and Me, the Ben Crump documentary Civil, the award winning film Master of Light and Williams’ first scripted feature Cassandro from Amazon Prime Video had its World premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival to universal acclaim.