About Robert Clem

Robert Clem has written, produced and directed works in film, television, radio and theater. Most frequently he has focused on fiction and nonfiction films set in his native Alabama, exploring and deconstructing its history, politics, literature, religion, music and its role as the nation’s central battleground in the movement for black civil rights.

A native of Alabama, a graduate of Birmingham-Southern College, Harvard Law and NYU graduate film school, and Robert has been a fellow at the Sundance Institute Writer/Director’s lab. His films adapt and document the history, literature and culture of the South and in particular his home state. After founding Radio Action Theater and the Foundation for New Media in 1990 he produced and directed dramatic radio programs aired on NPR based on the expedition of Hernando de Soto and the short stories of William Faulkner, Charles Chesnutt and William Gillmore Simms, with a cast that included Eli Wallach, Ossie Davis, Stacy Keach, David Strathairn, Hope Davis, Jeffery Wright, Campbell Scott, Betty Buckley, Lois Smith, Will Patton, Bill Raymond and John Glover.

His films How They Got Over:  Gospel Quartets and the Road to Rock & Roll, Alabama Black Belt Blues and the 2025 release Big Mama Thornton:   I Can’t Be Anyone But Me are part of the filmmaker’s personal journey to cross the boundaries that separated Whites from African Americans when he was growing up in Alabama.   He is presently writing a dramatic series for television based on the events, places and people in Alabama that have been the subject of his documentary work.