F11 AND BE THERE is an Emmy Award Wining feature documentary film that explores civil rights, equality, race, social justice, photography and art through the life and artistic legacy of famed Life Magazine and Magnum Photos photographer Burk Uzzle.  While traversing Uzzle’s 65+ year legacy, this documentary film finds its center in his contemporary portraiture work with African Americans in Eastern North Carolina. This film is a journey alongside one of America's greatest visual poets as he makes museums exhibitions with a local community, travels America's backroads in search of hidden treasures of Americana, and using his vast archive as a guide, confronts race, inequality, and injustice through the many parallels of the 20th and 21st centuries. F11 AND BE THERE (Jethro Waters / Waters Film LTD) won Best Documentary in the cultural category at the 2021 Midsouth Emmy® Awards.

F11 and Be There is a historical document, a non-linear pastiche of a life well lived, a musically driven homage to craft and artistic process, and a love letter to one man's life-long dedication to the idea of equality.

Glenn Kenny for The New York Times writes, “The film is as beautifully composed as Uzzle’s pictures. The director Jethro Waters also shot the movie, a subtle feast of light and color. The animated sections illustrating Uzzle’s past, by Cable Hardin, consist of white lines drawn against a deep gray background, and work beautifully. The music by Natalie Prass and Eric Slick is propulsive.”

Shana Nys Dambrot for LA Weekly writes, "F11 and Be There, which in addition to a richness of wide-ranging interviews with Uzzle, plentiful archival materials, and behind the scenes creative-process footage, is also a gorgeously produced film in itself. Warm and evocative cinematography, quirky and wonderful animated interstitials, lavish use of interesting music, and interviews with Uzzle’s subjects combine for a thoughtful and frequently profound and emotional portrait of an artist who has never been more engaged with his craft and message.”

Initially grounded in documentary photography when he was the youngest photographer ever hired by LIFE magazine at age 23, his work then grew into a combination of split-second impressions reflecting the human condition during his tenure as a member of the prestigious international Magnum cooperative founded by one of his mentors Henri Cartier-Bresson. For fifteen years, Uzzle was an active contributor to the evolution of the organization and served as its President in 1979 and 1980. During the sixteen years he was associated with Magnum, he produced some of the most recognizable images we have of Woodstock (album cover and worldwide reproduction of its iconic couple hugging at dawn) to the assassination and funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. to our comprehension for the experience of Cambodian war refugees. His archive spans over six decades.