Our Team

Claire Jeffreys

First-time director and producer Claire Jeffreys has spent over forty years as Garland’s partner, more than ten of them as his manager. Despite this intimate connection she presents a balanced portrait.

She brings with her access to a private archive of photos, articles and performance footage, scenes of family and professional life, and relationships with colleagues and admirers of Garland who readily made themselves available for interviews.

Evan Johnson

Editor and producer Evan Johnson discovered his passion for documentary film while studying at New York University’s Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. Soon after, he was learning hands-on as an assistant editor for HBO’s Sinatra: All Or Nothing At All and Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge. He helped craft Hulu’s And We Go Green, PBS’s The Oratorio and Disney’s Afterward. He served as editor and producer of All American, the acclaimed documentary about female high school wrestlers.

Blair Foster

Executive Producer Blair Foster has won two Emmys for her work on the Academy Award winning film, Taxi to the Dark Side, as well as an Emmy for Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World. Foster

produced the Emmy nominated Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, the Peabody Award winning Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown, and the acclaimed rock-doc, The History of the Eagles.

Rémi Grellety

Rémi Grellety is a two-time Oscar®-nominated film producer who has won an Emmy, a Peabody Award, a César, and a BAFTA.

For 15 years he produced Raoul Peck's fiction and documentary films at Velvet Film (operating between Paris and New York), including I Am Not Your Negro (2016, Audience awards at both Toronto and Berlin), The Young Karl Marx (feature, 2017, Berlin), the HBO miniseries, Exterminate All The Brutes (2021) as well as Silver DOllar Road (2023, TIFF) for Amazon Studios.

In parallel, Grellety has supported emerging filmmakers and produced six debut documentary films including A Taste of Whale by Vincent Kelner (2022, CPH:DOX) and Garland Jeffreys: The King of In Between by Claire Jeffreys (2023, DOC NYC Audience Award).

He has then founded a new production company, Warboys Films. His last production, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat by Johan Grimonprez, won a Special Jury Award at Sundance 2024 for "Cinematic Innovation", among many festival awards.

Grellety is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, European Film Academy and of the French Film Academy (Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma.)

Samuel D. Pollard

Executive Producer Samuel D. Pollard is an American film director, editor, producer, and screenwriter. His films have garnered numerous awards such as Peabodys, Emmys, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2020, the International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award. Spike Lee, whose films Pollard has edited and produced, described him as being "a master filmmaker." Henry Louis Gates Jr. characterizes his work in this way: "When I think about his documentaries, they add up to a corpus — a way of telling African-American history in its various dimensions."

Additional Editing

Ben Sozanski

Executive Producers

Bob Appleby

Juliana Terian

Co-Executive Producers

Kathleen Lavelle

Bill Tureby

Maureen & Stevie Van Zandt

Danny Zelisko

Consulting Producer

David Van Taylor

Field Producers

Chiemi Karasawa

Dirk Jan Roeleven

Associate Producer

Savannah Jeffreys

Archival Producer

Douglas Webb

Cinematography

Aaron Cassara

Pim Hawinkels

Christine Ng

Additional Cinematography

Charlie Beyer

Evan Blum

Gabe Dinsmoor

Liam Epstein

Jesse Moritz