Full Frame’s 9th Annual A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy Closes with “Framing the Conversation: Stanley Nelson”

Taking place on a Saturday afternoon in the lobby of The Durham Hotel, “Framing the Conversation: Stanley Nelson” was the final panel discussion in a series of A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy chats at this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. (Though the festival itself is an arm of the Center for Documentary Studies at the prestigious Duke University, these always informative, free-to-the-public, laidback talks have been the 22-year-old Full Frame’s secret weapon for close to a decade.) In town to interview Nelson, the down-to-earth founder of Firelight Media, a recipient of both the MacArthur “Genius Grant” and a National Humanities Medal from President Obama, and a filmmaker whose over three-decade career now includes his latest for PBS’s “American Masters” series Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, was Nancy Buirski, herself an award-winning filmmaker (The Loving Story, The Rape of Recy Taylor) and the founder of Full Frame.

Buirski began by noting that Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool seemed to mark a departure from the rest of Nelson’s oeuvre as it doesn’t deal explicitly with social justice and the African-American experience. Which also prompted her to wonder, “Are you an activist filmmaker?”

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