When documentary filmmaker Sacha Jenkins passed away in May of this year, he left a formidable legacy.
Jenkins, a multihyphenate who started out as a zine creator and co-founder of Ego Trip magazine, found considerable success in the film space, directing documentaries surveying Black music’s landmark figures in Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, All Up in the Biz, and Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James.
It’s curious then that his final film, Sunday Best, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2023, would be about a white man.
Sunday Best is a tightly structured and endlessly soulful biographical narrative about variety show host Ed Sullivan, the man whose stage introduced America to the newest and brightest sounds in music, from 1948 through 1971. Looking beyond Sullivan’s well-known legacy, Jenkins’ film posits Sullivan as a racial revolutionary who supported Black artists like Harry Belafonte, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and more, long before seeing Black faces on the relatively new medium of television was normalized. Without Sullivan, as this poppy and politically simple film claims, our everyday and musical world would be far different today.
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.
