FEATURED INTERVIEWS

JACQUELINE OLIVE is an independent filmmaker and immersive media producer with fifteen years of experience in journalism and film. Her debut feature documentary, Always in Season, premiered in competition at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency. The film is slated to broadcast on the PBS Emmy Award-winning series, Independent Lens, in February 2020. Jackie also co-directed the award-winning, hour-long film, Black to Our Roots, which broadcast on PBS WORLD in 2009. Jackie has received artist grants and industry funding from Sundance Institute, Independent Television Service, Ford Foundation, Tribeca Film Fund, Firelight Media, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Southern Documentary Fund, and more. She was recently awarded the Emerging Filmmakers of Color Award from International Documentary Association (IDA) and the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. In April 2019, Jackie was profiled as one of Variety’s “10 Filmmakers To Watch.”

Claudia Lacy (Featured in Always in Season) is the mother of Lennon Lacy, a 17-year-old who was found hanging from a swing set in rural North Carolina in 2014. Always in Season follows her search for justice and reconciliation begins while the trauma of more than a century of lynching African Americans bleeds into the present. Claudia’s hope for the film is that it will be used to keep her son’s story in the light and to highlight the systemic inequities we still see to this day.