'True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality' and 'The Edge of Democracy' by Columbia Filmmakers Win Peabody Awards

By
Felix van Kann
June 10, 2020

True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality, the new documentary by Professor of Professional Practice Trey Ellis just won a Peabody Award. Ellis served as executive producer and interviewee on the project that is available for streaming on HBO. The Edge of Democracy, a documentary project co-written & associate produced by current student Moara Passoni also took home one of the prestigious awards. 

True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality was first selected as one of 60 nominees for the Peabody Award representing the most compelling and empowering stories released in electronic media during 2019. It was chosen from about 1300 entries across news, entertainment, documentary, children's, public service, and web/interactive programming. 30 of the nominees received the coveted award. 

True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality is a portrait of the life and legal defense work of attorney Bryan Stevenson in representing the incarcerated poor and falsely accused victims of a racist judicial system in Alabama and the Deep South. Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and led the creation of its National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a memorial to the thousands of victims of racial terror lynching, both based in Montgomery. Through that narrative and the documentary, we see how the American judicial system itself is historically and directly accountable for sustaining racial violence, white supremacy, and the exploitation of black people. The film already won the National Association for Multi-ethnicity in Communications’s  26th annual Vision Award.

A scene with fighting soldiers and victims.

In The Edge of Democracy, director Petra Costa takes viewers through a first-person narration of Brazil’s tumultuous political history over the last several decades. Seen through the prism of her own family history of identification with both right-wing dictatorship (1964-85) and more contemporary leftist revolutionary movements, Costa’s documentary focuses on the rise and fall of former left-wing coalition presidents Luna da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. We witness their eventual downfalls (imprisonment and impeachment, respectively) due to corruption scandals and an intense judicial and legislative coup d’etat in 2014 focused on their removal from political life. The Edge of Democracy was also nominated for an Academy Award in the Feature Documentary category this year and a Critics’ Choice Award for Best Political Documentary and Best Narration.

“To me, the Peabody is the most important award in television,” Ellis said in a comment to the university. “I am so honored by this recognition of the hard work from our team. However, I am even more pleased that this will give the nation another opportunity to discover the work of Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative. Bryan and his team have been preaching the gospel of racial injustice for decades, but it seems that finally the nation is ready to hear it.” 

According to the Peabody Jury, “The Peabody Awards exist to recognize when storytelling is done well; when stories matter. By recognizing specific programming, the Peabody Awards spotlight programs that demonstrate how media can defend the public interest, encourage empathy with others, and teach us to expand our understanding of the world around us. Such media achieves the highest standards and exists across genre and media platforms, across regions and borders.”

Professor Trey Ellis is an Emmy and Peabody-winning filmmaker, an American Book Award Winning novelist, and playwright. He has written screenplays for, among others, Columbia Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, HBO and Showtime. His HBO film, The Tuskegee Airmen, was nominated for an Emmy and  went on to win a Peabody Award and several NAACP Image Awards. His screenplay for the Showtime film Good Fences, which starred Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover and was produced by Spike Lee, was shortlisted by PEN West for best teleplay and premiered at the Sundance Film festival. He is currently developing a television series about Amos ‘n’ Andy with Samuel L. Jackson based on Mr. Ellis’s Black List.com celebrated screenplay. Ellis is both an alumnus of the Sundance Institute and a Sundance international mentor. He was the subject of a half-hour PBS documentary and was featured in the book, Why We Write: Personal Statements and Photographic Portraits of 25 Top Screenwriters. Mr. Ellis’ first novel, Platitudes, was published in the United States and in France, followed by the novels, Home Repairs and Right Here, Right Now which won an American Book Award and was named one of the notable books of the year by The Washington Post. He is also author of the memoir, Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood. His first play, Fly, was produced by The Lincoln Center Institute and continues to be performed around the country including at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. When Ellis was a recent graduate of Stanford University, he published the essay, The New Black Aesthetic. Since then it has been reprinted dozens of times, cited in over sixty academic texts, and the term “New Black Aesthetic,” along with “cultural mulatto,” also coined by Ellis, are now routinely cited by scholars. He was an Executive Producer/Interviewer for the HBO documentary feature King in the Wilderness which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and was awarded the Emmy for Outstanding Historical Documentary. 

Moara Passoni is an MFA candidate of screenwriting-directing at Columbia. She graduated in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo, studied Dance & Performance at PUC/SP and Philosophy & Aesthetics at Paris 8 University. She holds two master's degrees in Film & Documentary by UNICAMP and FGV Brazil, and she worked as an Assistant Director and Researcher for Kiko Goiffman at PaleoTV where she directed her first short film released at the IDFF It's All True (São Paulo, Brazil). As a producer, Passoni participated in the making of films Elena, and Olmo and The Seagull, both directed by Petra Costa and executive produced by Tim Robbins. She is also a writer for Olmo and the Seagull.

True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality can be streamed on Youtube now, and The Edge of Democracy is available to stream on Netflix. The trailers are below.