Fresh from her recent appearance at the 67th Grammy Awards, at which the Grammys’ merit award for social change was renamed in honor of her father Harry Belafonte, the late singer and civil rights pioneer, actress Shari Belafonte will be arriving at the Sedona International Film Festival on Tuesday, Feb. 25, to introduce a new documentary about her father’s life and work, “Following Harry.”

The documentary is a sequel to 2011’s “Sing Your Song,” also directed by Susanne Rostock, which covered the earlier period of Harry Belafonte’s life and activism.

“It actually was something that’s been in the process for the last 60 years,” Shari Belafonte said. “I said, ‘Why are you going to do just one movie, Harry? You’ve got way too much going on in your life, it should be a Ken Burns miniseries.’”

“We became a lot closer in the last 30 years,” Belafonte said of her relationship with her father. “I grew up with him very much the way a lot of other people grew up with him, and that was from afar.”

Her parents had separatedd while her mother, educator and psychologist Marguerite Belafonte, was pregnant with her, as a consequence of tensions caused by Harry Belafonte’s increasingly high public profile, including his investigation by the FBI. “After the dust settled, they became quite friendly and they were always supportive of each other.”

Shari Belafonte’s own career has included modeling, regular and recurring roles on television and working behind the camera in film and TV.

“I was planning to be a jockey at first, but I’m a little too tall and a little too heavy, and then focused on being in production,” Belafonte laughed. “I never really anticipated being in front of the camera, it was just a fluke, and when I started making money at it, I went, maybe I’ll stay over here for a while.”

One of her early experiences was working with a TV crew on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

“It was right out of ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ where I would hear the great senator from this state sort of selling his constituents down the river to make this deal, this bargain with some lobbyist,” Belafonte recalled. “I got into arguments with my dad, basically saying, what the hell difference does it make? It’s all very corrupt, and I don’t see any reason why I need to spend the time going out to vote. And he convinced me that it was my right to make a difference.”

“When he was married to my mother … he’d gotten very involved with Paul Robeson and civil rights,” Belafonte continued. “He was really instrumental in getting the Kennedys, Bobby Sr. and John, to open their eyes and realize — especially Bobby, I think, embraced the idea rather quickly, or certainly far more than John did — in saying, look, civil rights is something that your administration needs to truly focus on. He made that introduction with Martin [Luther King] to Bobby and played sort of the go-between, the conduit that got them to work together and focus more on civil rights. He personally financed the first march in Alabama. He and Sidney [Poitier] brought $60,000 of their own money, mostly his money, into Alabama, to pay for the students and everybody to congregate. Obviously, he got on Hoover’s FBI list.”

The FBI illegally wiretapped conversations between Belafonte, King and other activists who were planning and financing Freedom Rides and voter registration drives.

“Certainly Martin was a huge catalyst to what we all know about, but if Martin didn’t have Harry behind him, I don’t know that it would have been quite as substantial a movement,” Belafonte added.

For Harry Belafonte, music and civil rights were two complementary forces to be employed in combination.

“I’ve always considered his music was an avenue to share his civil rights activism,” Shari Belafonte said. “His performances, his concerts were just a wonderful way for him to get the message across … He was really the first sizeable artist that brought people in from other countries to perform with him. Nana Mouskouri, Miriam Makeba, Savuka. He’s always been a global personality, with activism being his first and foremost love.”

“Just the very nature of being an artist makes you more human,” Belafonte reflected, a concept rooted in the biological relationship between human cognition and artistic participation.

Later in his career, Harry Belafonte would organize dozens of his fellow artists to write and perform “We Are the World,” one of the top-selling songs of all time, to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia.

“He said, “I’m meeting with Ken Kragen for lunch and for dinner; I want you to come with me,’” Shari Belafonte remembered. “I’m sitting between him and Ken, and Ken said, ‘So what’s up, what have you got?’ Harry said, ‘I’ve got this idea to bring all these musicians together, and I think the best time to do it is around the Oscars and the Grammys.’ And he looks at me and says, ‘Write this down’ … So he started naming names … He said, ‘I want them all in the same room and we sing a common song and raise awareness and money for Africa.’

“As he was saying this, I said in my head, good luck with that, Harry! Putting Madonna and Barbra Streisand in the same room? I don’t think that’s going to happen … And of course, it became ‘We Are the World,’ and everybody showed up, except the first two that were on Harry’s list, which were Madonna and Barbra Streisand. The rest is history.”

A few years ago, Belafonte asked her father if he felt that social conditions in the United States had become worse than they were during the 1960s.

“He said, absolutely. I think there was some disheartening in the last few years, where he just felt, ‘What did I work this hard for for so many years?’”

“There were some things that I think he shifted a little bit on,” Belafonte said with regard to her father’s political views. “I know that he was quite friendly with Fidel Castro, and he thought that Fidel was certainly far better than [Fulgencio] Batista … But over those years — the last time we went to Cuba, 15 years ago, when he was doing ‘Sing Your Song,’ and he was going to speak to Fidel for the last time, he asked me to come and shoot it, because I’m also behind the camera.

“I had seen Cuba from 40 years previously and it was very run-down and obviously it was still living in the past, and now it was still quite run-down. “I brought up the question to Fidel and to the cabinet members that were there in this meeting,” Belafonte continued. “I understood the idea of everybody being on the dole so everybody had an opportunity and everybody was equal, but now everybody is complacent. There’s all this lush beautiful country and there’s no real agriculture. We were driving around, and I’m going, ‘Why are you still trying to get pineapples from Florida?’ … Basically Fidel confessed, ‘You know, people have become complacent and they don’t feel the need to have to work.’ That, I think, kind of was a disappointment both for Harry and Fidel that it didn’t quite work out as they would have liked it to.”

“He was quite friendly with Bobby and John and with Martin — of course, he was best friends with Martin — to see John get shot, and then Bobby get shot, and then Martin get shot, that’s got to do something to you,” Belafonte added. “I don’t think it shifted his views as much as made him realize that everybody was vulnerable, that you needed to be focused on what you wanted to accomplish.”

Are artists today, and black artists in particular, living up to Harry’s legacy?

“I like to believe they’re out there doing what they can to make a difference in the world and not just be focused on making a difference in their pockets,” Belafonte said.