Presented in collaboration with Blackstar Film Festival 2022, please visit BlackStar.org for more details.

As a filmmaker, Hazel Gurland-Pooler has trained her eye on social movement and women as leaders in economic justice struggles. Her feature documentary, Storming Caesar’s Palace is a portrait of the Las Vegas’ labor leader Ruby Duncan. Join Hazel Gurland-Pooler as she talks about her creative process and the long-term alliances she forms with subjects as a strategy for creating moving, impactful and useful films. 

Born in Colombia, Gurland-Pooler directed 10 episodes of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and co-produced the 6-hour PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, also with Gates, which was honored with Emmy, Peabody, duPont-Columbia, and NAACP Image awards. Storming Caesars Palace, a finalist of a 2020 Ken Burns/Levine/Library of Congress Prize, will broadcast nationally on PBS in 2023.