Colin Luther Powell is an American politician, diplomat and retired four-star general who served as the 65th United States Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005. Powell was the first African-American Secretary of State. Prior to the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, Powell and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch. Powell served as the 16th United States National Security Advisor from 1987 to 1989 and as the 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993.
Levardis Robert Martyn Burton Jr. is an American actor, director, and children's television host. He is best known for his role as Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation, his role as Kunta Kinte in the ABC miniseries Roots (1977), and as host of Reading Rainbow for 23 years.
Robert Powell is an English actor who is known for the title roles in Mahler (1974) and Jesus of Nazareth (1977), and for his portrayal of secret agent Richard Hannay in The Thirty Nine Steps (1978) and its subsequent spinoff television series. Other major screen roles have included Tobias "Toby" Wren in the BBC science-fiction programme Doomwatch (1970), David Briggs in the sitcom The Detectives (1993–1997) alongside Jasper Carrott, and Mark Williams in the medical drama Holby City (2005–2011).
Harry Belafonte is an American singer, songwriter, activist, and actor. One of the most successful Jamaican-American pop stars in history, he was dubbed the "King of Calypso" for popularizing the Trinidadian Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s. His breakthrough album Calypso (1956) was the first million-selling LP by a single artist. Belafonte is known for his recording of "The Banana Boat Song", with its signature lyric "Day-O". He has recorded and performed in many genres, including blues, folk, gospel, show tunes, and American standards. He has also starred in several films, including Otto Preminger's hit musical Carmen Jones (1954), Island in the Sun (1957), and Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).
Michael Latham Powell was an English filmmaker, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger. Through their production company The Archers, they together wrote, produced and directed a series of classic British films, notably The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). His later controversial 1960 film Peeping Tom, while today considered a classic, and a contender as the first "slasher", was so vilified on first release that his career was seriously damaged.
Rageh Omaar is a Somali-born British journalist and writer. He was a BBC world affairs correspondent, where he made his name reporting from Iraq. In September 2006, he moved to a new post at Al Jazeera English, where he presented the nightly weekday documentary series Witness until January 2010. The Rageh Omaar Report, first aired February 2010, is a one-hour, monthly investigative documentary in which he reports on international current affairs stories. From January 2013, he became a special correspondent and presenter for ITV News, reporting on a broad range of news stories, as well as producing special in-depth reports from all around the UK and further afield. A year after his appointment, Omaar was promoted to International Affairs Editor for ITV News. Since October 2015, alongside his duties as International Affairs Editor, he has been a Deputy Newscaster of ITV News at Ten. Since September 2017 Omaar has occasionally presented the ITV Lunchtime News including the ITV News London Lunchtime Bulletin and the ITV Evening News.
The British film-making partnership of Michael Powell (1905–1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988)—together often known as The Archers, the name of their production company—made a series of influential films in the 1940s and 1950s. Their collaborations—24 films between 1939 and 1972—were mainly derived from original stories by Pressburger with the script written by both Pressburger and Powell. Powell did most of the directing while Pressburger did most of the work of the producer and also assisted with the editing, especially the way the music was used. Unusually, the pair shared a writer-director-producer credit for most of their films. The best-known of these are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).
The Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is an annual fortnight of cinema screenings and related events taking place each June. Established in 1947, it is the world's oldest continually running film festival. EIFF presents both UK and international films, in all genres and lengths. It also presents themed retrospectives and other specialised programming strands. The 2016 edition was the Festival's 70th. Spain was the country focus in 2019. The 73rd edition of EIFF ran from 19 – 30 June 2019. The full programme was announced on 29 May 2019.
Ivan Tors was a Hungarian playwright, film director, screenwriter, and film and television producer with an emphasis on non-violent but exciting science fiction, underwater sequences, and stories involving animals. He started a Miami-based film studio now known as Greenwich Studios, and later a music company.
Frederic Alan Schepisi is an Australian film director, producer and screenwriter. His credits include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Plenty, Roxanne, A Cry in the Dark, Mr. Baseball, Six Degrees of Separation, and Last Orders.
Paweł Aleksander Pawlikowski is a Polish filmmaker, who has lived and worked most of his life in the United Kingdom. He garnered acclaim for a string of award-winning documentaries in the 1990s and for his feature films Last Resort and My Summer of Love, both of which won a BAFTA and many other European awards. His film Ida won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. At the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, Pawlikowski won the Best Director prize for his 2018 film Cold War, a film which also earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film.
Aubrey Powell is a British graphic designer who is known better for co-founding the album cover design company Hipgnosis with Storm Thorgerson in 1967. The company ran successfully for 15 years until 1982. Hipgnosis created some of the most innovative and surreal record cover art of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s for many of the most famous rock bands of the era including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Yes, Genesis, 10cc, Peter Gabriel, Bad Company, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Scorpions, Styx, Syd Barrett, and Black Sabbath. Hipgnosis was nominated five times for Grammy Awards.
Ian Dalrymple was a British screenwriter, film director, film editor and film producer.
Norman Scott Powell is an American television executive.
Trouble the Water is a 2008 documentary film produced and directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. The film portrays a young couple surviving Hurricane Katrina, leading them to face their own troubled past during the storm's aftermath, in a community abandoned long before the hurricane hit. It features music by Massive Attack, Mary Mary, Citizen Cope, John Lee Hooker, The Roots, Dr. John and Blackkoldmadina. Trouble the Water is distributed by Zeitgeist Films and premiered in theaters in New York City and Los Angeles on August 22, 2008, followed by a national release in more than 200 theaters. It had its television premiere on HBO and has been rebroadcast on National Geographic Channel and Turner Classic Movies. Trouble the Water is available on DVD.
Craig Goodwill is a writer/director, principally of short films and music videos.
Martin Smith is a producer, writer, director and correspondent. Smith has produced dozens of nationally broadcast documentaries for CBS News, ABC News and PBS Frontline. His films range in topic from war in the Middle East to the 2008 financial crisis.
Nila Madhab Panda is an Indian film producer and director. Panda has produced and directed over 70 films, documentaries and shorts based on social issues such as climate change, child labor, education, water issues, sanitation and many other developmental issues in India.
Dreamcatcher is a 2015 British-American documentary film directed by Kim Longinotto focusing on Brenda Myers-Powell, a former professional who runs The Dreamcatcher Foundation, a charity which helps women in Chicago leave the sex industry. The film won the World Cinema Directing Award in the documentary category at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Showtime Networks acquired the rights to the film on 23 January 2015.
Holy Water-Gate: Abuse Cover-up in the Catholic Church is a 2004 documentary which investigates the crisis that emerged within the Roman Catholic Church, as victims of child sex abuse by priests fight to bring their abusers to justice. The film begins as a personal journey of filmmaker Mary Healey, who is also Catholic. Through key players in the scandal, including victims, whistle-blower priests and a senior ranking U.S. Cardinal who is called upon by the Vatican to control an ever-growing storm, Holy Water-Gate brings the viewer deep within the institutional mind of the U.S. Catholic Church: a powerful establishment that not only failed the victims for many years by not acknowledging their abuse, but also enabled some priests to continue to abuse more children by relocating them in other parishes. This intensely personal and political story investigates the crisis and exposes the reluctance within the U.S. mainstream media for decades to report sexual abuse crimes against children by priests.
