TEASER

The love story of the remarkable Gloria Clayborne and renowned jazz pianist Junior Mance, whose charmed career spans seventy years.

Junior has played with Dizzy, Dinah, Cannonball––all the greats. But it’s not until 1996, that he meets his great love: Gloria Clayborne.

They quickly marry, she becomes his manager, and they travel the world together, with music at the center of their relationship.

Then in 2012, Junior has a stroke and develops dementia. Although his musical abilities are still impeccable, Gloria knows their time is limited. She’s compelled to consider-- who will he be without the music? Who will she be? Who will they be together?

A buoyant pragmatist, Gloria keeps them both on key, but slowly accepts that she cannot control everything with sheer will, as she's done her whole life. Ultimately she is forced to let go and learns to improvise. Gloria and Junior’s relationship, in its enduring complexity, imperfection and connection, offers insight into navigating life’s challenges with love and empathy.

Sunset and the Mockingbird is told from Gloria’s perspective. It is loosely structured around her personal journal entries, functioning in a way like the spine of a jazz composition. Using verité footage intertwined with archival photos and film, the film fluidly moves from past to present, as memory does.

The Filmmakers

Jyllian is an Emmy-award winning multimedia storyteller. Her second award-winning feature doc, The New Public, aired on PBS, distributed by Kino Lorber with a curriculum created by Teachers College at Columbia University.

Her first critically-acclaimed doc, Pull Out, was an official selection of numerous national and international film festivals and is in development as a series for television.

Other credits include: Director, Writer, & Co-Executive Producer of the HBO rom doc series, Swiping America; Director/Writer on multiple episodes of the NBC Emmy award-winning series, Who Do You Think You Are; ABC’s The Last Defense, executive produced by Viola Davis; Director, Prod/Writer for the Amazon/Jigaw New Yorker magazine series, The New Yorker Presents.

She won a Christopher Award for her work as EP/Director of the History/A&E documentary, Black Patriots: Heroes of the American Revolution, featuring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Essie Chambers is a Brooklyn-based writer, producer, and consultant.

Her debut novel, Swift River, will be released by Simon and Schuster, spring 2024.

Essie has received writing fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Baldwin for the Arts.

She is a producer on the Oscar shortlisted documentary Descendant, currently on Netflix, directed by Margaret Brown.

She is a development consultant for WarnerMedia OneFifty and WarnerMedia Kids & Family.

Essie has held senior executive positions at Nickelodeon and BET Networks.

She was producer on the PBS documentary The New Public, and co-producer on the documentary Pull Out.

Kali Holloway is the Director of the Make It Right Project, a new national campaign to take down Confederate Monuments and tell the truth about history; she is also a Senior Correspondent at the Independent Media Institute.

She previously was Senior Writer and Associate Editor of Media & Culture at progressive news site AlterNet. She co-curated the Metropolitan Museum of Art's MetLiveArts 2017 summer performance and film series “Theater of the Resist.”

She was Director of Outreach and Audience Engagement for the HBO documentary Southern Rites, PBS documentary The New Public, and the Emmy-nominated film Brooklyn Castle, and Outreach Consultant on the award-winning documentary The New Black.

She worked in production and programming on the long-running PBS documentary film series POV. Prior to that, she was speechwriter for a New York City Commissioner and Deputy Director of Communications for the New York State court system.

Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Daily Beast, Salon, The Guardian, TIME, Huffington Post, The National Memo, Yahoo!

Yance Ford is the director of Strong Island, which was nominated for a 2018 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and won the Special Jury Award for Storytelling at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Ford is a Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program Fellow and a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a CreativeCapital Grantee (Theo Westenberger Award) and has been featured in Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film. He is a former Series Producer of POV, a graduate of Hamilton College and the Production Workshop at Third World Newsreel. The Guardian said of his directorial debut "There's something different about Strong Island, however, a film characterized by raw emotion and calm anger, which must surely be considered one of the finest documentaries of 2017 already.”

Mary Harron's debut film, “I Shot Andy Warhol,” was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, and went on to pick up awards at the Sundance, Stockholm and Gijón International Film Festivals. Her 2000 film “American Psycho,” based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, has become a fervently loved cult favorite.Other credits include the Netflix mini series, “Alias Grace.” She executive produced “The Weather Underground,” a documentary which offered a look at the radical 1970s political organization. Television credits include: Graceland, The Following, Oz, Six Feet Under, Homicide: Life on the Street, The L Word and Big Love. Currently, she is working on a film based on the book Please Kill Me, an oral history of the New York punk scene in which she was a key player. A co-founder of the legendary magazine Punk, she was the first journalist to interview the Sex Pistols for an American outlet.

Rachel has worked to improve the public good, whether at the Department of Public Health, producing documentary films, or directing organizations that support the lives of young people.  

She produced the Emmy Award winning film “Breaking the Mold” directed by Joshua Seftel, and conducted outreach for numerous education films and social and political documentaries. 

As Associate Director at YouthBuild USA, she was responsible for developing promotional material ensuring to highlight the human, political and emotional elements of the work. She produced and fundraised for the documentary short “Elias’ Stand” which played at film festivals across the country and has had over a million views.

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