Marco Williams
Directing
Known For

This acclaimed Emmy Award-winning anthology series features documentaries and a limited number of fiction films united by the creative freedom, artistic achievement and unflinching visions of their independent producers and featuring unforgettable stories about a unique individual, community or moment in history.
Independent Lens

Since its 1988 premiere, this critically acclaimed documentary series has presented hundreds of films that put a human face on contemporary social issues by relating a compelling story in an intimate fashion. "POV" has won virtually every major film and broadcasting award available, including 38 Emmys, 22 Peabody Awards and three Oscars.
POV

Lacey Schwartz grew up in a typical upper-middle-class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her Jewish identity - despite the open questions from those around her about how a white girl could have such dark skin. She believes her family's explanation that her looks were inherited from her dark-skinned Sicilian grandfather. But when her parents abruptly split, her gut starts to tell her something different. At age of 18, she finally confronts her mother and learns the truth: her biological father was not the man who raised her, but a black man named Rodney with whom her mother had had an affair.
Little White Lie

National Geographic goes inside and undercover to reveal the secrets and inner-workings of a myriad of topics.
National Geographic: Inside

Executive produced by NBA superstar and philanthropist Russell Westbrook, and directed by Peabody and Emmy-Award® winning director Stanley Nelson (“Freedom Riders”) and Peabody and duPont-Award winner Marco Williams (“Two Towns of Jasper”), the documentary commemorates the 100th anniversary of the horrific Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history, and calls attention to the previously ignored but necessary repair of a town once devastated.
Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre

Set in the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, "93Queen" follows a group of tenacious Hasidic women who are smashing the patriarchy in their community by creating the first all-female volunteer ambulance corps in New York City. With unprecedented-and insider-access, "93Queen" offers up a unique portrayal of a group of religious women who are taking matters into their own hands to change their own community from within.
93Queen

How would you handle the trauma of losing a loved one? Murders That Matter documents African American Muslim mother Movita Johnson-Harrell over five years as she transforms from a victim of violent trauma into a fierce advocate against gun violence in Black communities.
Murders That Matter

Using two separate filmmaking teams (an all-white crew filming white residents and an all-black camera crew filming black residents), TWO TOWNS OF JASPER captures very different racial views by townsfolk in Jasper, Texas, the location for a racially motivated murder of an African American man in 1998.
Two Towns of Jasper

Pigeons do somersaults in mid-flight, and there is a tight-knit community of pigeon breeders and trainers in South Central L.A. devoted to this phenomenon as a competitive sport.
Pigeon Kings

A look at three U.S. cities, which were part of many communities that violently forced African American families to flee in post-reconstruction America.
Banished

Tells the story of New Orleans's black aristocracy as seen through the eyes of an African American debutante and her matriarchal family. This poignant coming of age story opens a lens to the wider struggle of black New Orleans's to shape an upper class society during the rise of the Jim Crow south.
Member of the Club
Marco Williams-directed short film.
Without a Pass

In one of Latin America’s most unequal countries, Francia Márquez, a Black Colombian rural activist, challenges the status quo with a presidential campaign that reappropriates the derogatory term “Igualada” — someone who acts as if they deserve rights that supposedly don’t correspond to them — and inspires a nation to dream.
Igualada
Funded by a tax on cannabis, Evanston, IL, earmarked $10 million to compensate descendants of enslaved Africans for 400 years of unpaid labor. Alderwoman Simmons leads her constituents through this historic campaign for reparations for the Black c...
The Big Payback

As the first pupil from his Harlem high school to attend Harvard University, a teenager faces both external and internal challenges during his freshman year.
From Harlem to Harvard

Williams, who was raised by his mother and aunt, had been trying for months to get his mother to talk about his father, whom he had never met and knew nothing about. Having finally relented, she allowed him to come to Paris, where she was living, and film an interview.
In Search of Our Fathers
The 20-member band Septentrional has been making music for 62 years as Haiti's most celebrated big band. This inspirational doc charts the history of Haiti from its independence from French colonialism to 2010's devastating earthquake-all set to the vibrant music of Septentrional and punctuated with personal memories.
When the Drum Is Beating
This Independent Lens documentary was directed by Marco Williams, and shows how attempts to cross the Mexico-U.S. border via Arizona's deserts lead to hundreds of deaths annually.