Following Harry (2025)

Mike talks with director Susanne Rostock about Following Harry (2025), which picks up where her 2011 Sundance opener Sing Your Song left off and follows Harry Belafonte through the last twelve years of his life as he tries to pass his activism on before running out of time.

Rostock and Belafonte shared an office for years — she’d hear his cane tapping down the hall every afternoon — and the access that grew out of that friendship put her camera in the room as Trayvon Martin’s killing, Ferguson, and the Women’s March unfolded around him. The film closes on Belafonte’s own account of a state trooper who, after witnessing the brotherly love Belafonte brought into a room in 1963, took the bullets out of his gun and said they could never go back in. Rostock, trained as an ethnographic filmmaker under Margaret Mead before an early detour into editing SNL-era shorts (including the Ruttles’ faux-blues number in All You Need Is Cash), shoots everything first and assembles the structure only once she has a mountain of footage to sort through.

This isn’t a legacy rewatch — the film is new, built from Rostock’s own archive of the last decade of Belafonte’s life, and arrives on VOD this week.

Visit the film’s official website (opens in a new tab) for where to watch.