We’ve had some good news on the family front.

My niece is a documentary film producer who worked on the 2022 Academy Award winning documentary “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, an event that rivaled Woodstock but was completely ignored by the mainstream media. Here’s the trailer:

Now, most people didn’t know about the festival, because film shot during it was hidden in a vault for decades.

And most people don’t know the film won the Oscar, because it was the category Chris Rock was announcing when he was slapped in the face by Will Smith (which will have me pissed off at Smith forever). My niece was at the Oscar ceremony when it happened. People were so shocked by the slap, the actual Academy Award win was completely overlooked.

But that was back in 2022.

Since then, she’s worked on a number of documentaries and is currently a producer at ESPN. Here’s an excerpt from one of her films:

That eight-part documentary was nominated for an Emmy Award earlier this year, and won for Outstanding Audio/Sound:

But on Sunday, the 27th WIN Awards (Women’s Image Network Awards), were held in Los Angeles and, as shown in the image at the top, “In the Arena” received a Best Producer nomination as well as nominations for Best Reality Series and Best Director.

It won for Reality Series, and Ashley Bembry-Kaintuck, my niece, won for Best Producer. A big day for the family.

Here she is, in a panel discussion in 2024, talking about film production and her documentary work at the Imagine This Women’s International Film Festival:

By the way, I briefly appear in crowd shots for another documentary she did with her father, an ESPN writer. That film, “On & Coppin,” was about the 1997 NCAA basketball tournament, in which a No. 15 seed, Coppin State, beat the No. 2 seed South Carolina in the first round. Also keeping this in the family, my nephew, Kareem Lewis, was a forward who had an important role in the Coppin win. He briefly appears in this clip: