Billy Porter has joined the Oscar-qualified documentary short, “Freeman Vines,” as an executive producer.

Directors André Robert Lee and Tim Kirkman’s film is a haunting portrait of 82-year-old Freeman Vines, a sculptor and guitar-maker in rural Fountain, N.C., who carves some of his instruments from lumber taken from a tree used in the lynching of a young Black man named Oliver Moore. As Vines faces multiple myeloma and diabetes late in life, the film captures his philosophy, humor and unflinching confrontation with the legacy of racism in the American South.

“Freeman Vines was a fierce, extraordinary human, and this expression of his story is simply gorgeous,” Porter said in a statement Thursday. “The life of an artist can be a hard road, and Freeman navigated a complicated community

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