Roger Ross Williams Receives Impact Award From Miami Film Festival

For a documentary filmmaker, there’s no greater compliment than to hear the words, “Your film made an impact.”

For that reason, it was particularly significant this week for Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams to earn the Impact Award from the Miami Film Festival.

“It means so much now in this day and age when everything I know and value is under assault,” Williams tells Deadline. “And especially documentary is under assault. We don’t even see ‘impact documentaries’ anymore. We see them at festivals, but they’re not being sold. The buyers aren’t really interested in impact documentaries anymore. So, it’s particularly meaningful and important that the Miami Film Festival has given me this award at this time in history.”

The presentation of the award, made by MFF executive director James Woolley, came after a screening of Williams’ 2023 feature Stamped From the Beginning – one of the rare ‘impact documentaries’ to be backed by a streamer, in this case Netflix (would Netflix acquire it today, were it were being released now, in Trump’s America? A hypothetical for another day). The film, based on the book by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, examines structural racism in the U.S. stretching from before the country’s founding up to the present day.

“I think Stamped From the Beginning is particularly important now, but I also think it’s kind of inspiring for folks who are down about what’s going on in the world because this isn’t new,” Williams says. “Throughout history, especially for Black Americans, we have always fought. We’re always the people who are fighting for democracy, fighting for human rights, and in Stamped you see when we have big setbacks and historical setbacks that have happened over and over and over and over and over again to Black Americans, there’s a resistance. We get inspired, we get motivated, then there’s a [backlash], and the pendulum swings the other way. So, we’re looking at the backlash right now from the Obama years, Biden years, Kamala Harris. We’re looking at the pendulum swing, but there will be a resistance to that.”

He adds, “This isn’t permanent, what’s happening. And when someone as brilliant as Ibram X. Kendi, a historian, can look at the bigger history — that’s what’s great about seeing the film, you see it in a new light. You’re like, ‘Oh wait, this isn’t something new. This isn’t something that’s happening to us for the first time, to marginalized people, people of color.’ This has happened before, and we fought back, and we’ve won. So, I look at it as an inspirational, positive call to action.”

Stamped From the Beginning was shortlisted for the Academy Awards and earned a nomination for a primetime Emmy Award. It’s consonant with Williams’ 2023 Emmy-winning documentary series The 1619 Project, based on the sensational Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series created by Nikole Hannah-Jones. In fact, Stamped connects with a great deal of the Williams canon.

“There’s no one in America more resilient than Black Americans. And that’s what The Apollo was about, that’s what 1619 is about. Stamped From the Beginning, High on the Hog, all of it,” he observes. “The theme of my work is Black resilience, and that will continue in future work and will continue to be the reality of Black people. There’s no one more resilient than us. There’s no one who’s been through more than we have been through — dragged here against our will, through the Middle Passage and slavery, and thrived and defined culture in many ways in America. We’ve had a president, culture-defining music, jazz and rap, and R&B, and dance. Every fabric of American life is built on Black culture and Black labor.”

Stamped From the Beginning, winner of the National Book Award, was published in 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected president the first time. Now, in his second term of office, Trump has made a top priority of dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs – and, indeed, scrubbing mention of diversity or the achievements of African Americans from anything that falls within the purview of the federal government or that benefits from government funding. According to a New York Times report published Friday, just over a week ago the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD purged books from its library shelves related to the Holocaust, gender, LGBTQ identity, and Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, among hundreds of other books. But it left untouched Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other books with a racist ideology.

Per the report, “Political appointees in the Department of the Navy’s leadership decided which books to remove.”

Similarly, the Trump administration is investigating Yale, MIT and dozens of other colleges and universities “for alleged racial discrimination,” according to reports in Fortune and other news outlets, “as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs.”

Last week, Williams traveled to Yale for a screening of Stamped From the Beginning hosted by the university’s Office of Inclusion and Diversity.

“They said to us, ‘Well, you’re probably one of the last events because Diversity and Inclusion is being renamed,’” Williams shares. “And even the Afro-American Center, which has been there for 55 years, is under threat of losing their space and shutting down.”

Williams was joined for a Q&A at Yale by Stamped producers Alisa Payne and David Teague; Dr. Kendi participated via Zoom. “The questions [from the students] were all, ‘Can you give us words of encouragement to keep fighting? How do we find the strength to keep going when all this is happening to us?’” Williams notes. “And Dr. Kendi said, ‘If you do nothing, terrible things will happen to you. You will keep suffering. But if you get out and you fight and you do something, terrible things may happen to you. So, they’re going to happen regardless. If you fight, you actually may make a difference and create change. You can sit back and let it all happen to you and do nothing, or you can go out and fight and let it all happen to you and actually maybe make a difference…’ They were very inspired by that.”

Williams says neither he nor the African American community as a whole has abandoned hope.

“We going to continue to fight to uphold the ideals of democracy,” he says. “But we’re also going to continue in our lives and Black joy and the positive things and community.”