MLK/FBI

Sam Pollard's 2020 documentary lays out the FBI's campaign of surveillance and harassment against Martin Luther King through declassified files. Wiretaps, microphones placed in hotel rooms, the unsigned letter sent to King that reads as an invitation to suicide: all of it is set out from the documents. What the film handles most carefully is refusing to reduce this to the obsession of one man, J. Edgar Hoover. The surveillance was legal, it was authorised, it was carried out institutionally, and it found broad support in the political climate of the time. On that point the documentary declines to hand the viewer a comforting villain. There are almost no talking heads on screen; the historians are heard over archive footage and their faces appear only at the end. The FBI's audio recordings are sealed by court order until 2027, and the film closes by naming that date. Who it's for: those interested in American civil rights history and in how state surveillance operates. Who it's not for: viewers who want only the iconic portrait of King; the documentary also opens claims about his private life to discussion.