Celebrating Black History

Celebrating Black History

Celebrate Black artists and artistry this and every month on Metrograph At Home, with titles from celebrated and emerging filmmakers including Kathleen Collins, Julie Dash, RaMell Ross, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Rungano Nyoni, and more streaming on demand!

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Celebrating Black History
  • Hale County This Morning, This Evening

    Directed by RaMell Ross | 76 mins | 2018
    The results of five years of living among African American families in rural Hale County, Alabama—also the setting of Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Ross’s debut feature documentary is a lyrical and loving treatment ...

  • Four Women

    Directed by Julie Dash | 8 mins | 1975
    A five-film shorts program curated by LA Rebellion affiliated-filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, including works by Pierre Desir ("The Gods and the Thief"), Julie Dash ("Four Women"), Portia Cobb ("Don’t Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable"), and others.

    “These short...

  • I Am Not a Witch

    Leaving March 1

    Directed by Rungano Nyoni | 93 mins | 2017
    A young Zambian girl is accused of being a witch and then pressed into soothsaying service by a slick government official in this strikingly shot deadpan satire. Skewering superstition and corruption, it’s a feminist exposé of exploitati...

  • Felicité

    Directed by Alain Gomis | 124 mins | 2017
    Gomis’s vibrant, tumultuous fourth feature follows Félicité, a free-willed nightclub singer in the heart of Kinshasa, whose life is thrown into turmoil when her 14-year-old son gets into a terrible car accident. To raise the money to save him, she embarks...

  • Hyenas

    Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 110 mins | 1992
    One of the treasures of contemporary cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty made his long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki with this hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit. In Mam...

  • Le Franc

    Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 45 mins | 1994
    Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992, re-released in a new restoration by Metrograph Pictures in 2019). Yet these two extraordinary films tell only part of...

  • The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun

    Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 45 mins | 1999
    Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992, re-released in a new restoration by Metrograph Pictures in 2019). Yet these two extraordinary films tell only part of...

  • Downtown 81

    Directed by Edo Bertoglio | 72 mins | 2000
    In 1980, writer and Warhol associate Glenn O’Brien, Swiss photographer Edo Bertoglio, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a graffiti innovator and noise music artist who’d just begun to exhibit his paintings, hit the streets of lower Manhattan to make a movie abou...

  • Spirits of Rebellion: Black Independent Cinema from Los Angeles

    Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis | 101 mins | 2016
    Davis’s documentary on the LA Rebellion, a surge of artistically ambitious, far-from-the-mainstream Black-American-directed films that came out of southern California—specifically, out of the UCLA film production program—beginning in the late ’70s...

  • Pandemic Bread

    Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis | 22 mins | 2023
    A five-film shorts program curated by LA Rebellion affiliated-filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, including works by Pierre Desir ("The Gods and the Thief"), Julie Dash ("Four Women"), Portia Cobb ("Don’t Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable"), and others.

    “T...

  • Don't Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable

    Directed by Portia Cobb | 26 mins | 1996
    A five-film shorts program curated by LA Rebellion affiliated-filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, including works by Pierre Desir ("The Gods and the Thief"), Julie Dash ("Four Women"), Portia Cobb ("Don’t Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable"), and others.

    “These sho...

  • The Gods and the Thief

    Directed by Pierre Desir | 18 mins | 2001
    A five-film shorts program curated by LA Rebellion affiliated-filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, including works by Pierre Desir ("The Gods and the Thief"), Julie Dash ("Four Women"), Portia Cobb ("Don’t Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable"), and others.

    “These sh...

  • Carry Me, I'll Let Go

    Directed by Alexis Hithe | 12 mins | 2022
    A five-film shorts program curated by LA Rebellion affiliated-filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, including works by Pierre Desir ("The Gods and the Thief"), Julie Dash ("Four Women"), Portia Cobb ("Don’t Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable"), and others.

    “These sh...

  • Losing Ground

    Directed by Kathleen Collins | 86 mins | 1982
    One of the first feature films directed by an African American woman, and a charming, complex tale of personal discovery that follows the marriage between a philosophy professor (Seret Scott) and her painter husband (Bill Gunn), both at a crossroads ...

  • Ornette: Made in America

    Leaving March 1

    Directed by Shirley Clarke | 85 mins | 1985
    “Discovering the work of filmmaker and the Film-Makers' Cooperative co-founder, Shirley Clarke made me aware of the wide range of cinema’s possibilities. This 1985 documentary shot in collaboration with the late Ornette Coleman, using a...

  • Portrait of Jason

    Leaving March 1

    Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
    A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of ...

  • The Connection

    Leaving March 1

    Directed by Shirley Clarke | 110 mins | 1961
    “Shirley Clarke’s The Connection based on and adapted by Jack Gelber is a film way ahead of its time. Arguably the first film to use the “found footage” trope to tell a fictional story. This film blew my mind when I first saw it, the d...