Celebrating Black History
“White kids graduated into an industry, we graduated into a desert,” decries "Sankofa" (1993) director Haile Gerima in "Spirits of Rebellion", Zeinabu Irene Davis’s vital portrait of the LA Rebellion filmmaking collective, which was forged at UCLA. Spanning five decades of filmmaking here in the US and in Africa, this robust collection—which includes Davis’s documentary—evidences the tenacity and potent, variegated colors of Black cinema’s desert blooms—from landmark works by Bill Gunn and Bill Duke through to previously hard-to-see gems like "Chameleon Street" and fearless contemporary genre-benders, among them the Nollywood riffs of Nigeria’s "Abba Makama", "Black Mother", and "The Inheritance".
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Portrait of Jason
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 Jason grows from ... -
The Killing Floor
Directed by Bill Duke | 118 mins | 1984
Having made inroads in Hollywood as a character actor, Bill Duke made his directorial debut with this raw and deeply researched made-for-TV movie set in Chicago’s stockyards in the early days of the Great Migration. Duke mines the volatile intersection of r... -
Ganja & Hess
Directed by Bill Gunn | 113 mins | 1973
Cut by timid distributors and inappropriately marketed as grindhouse blaxploitation, this eerie, sui generis work by utterly iconoclastic director Bill Gunn ("Personal Problems") is, in its original form, nothing short of a masterpiece of ‘70s American cine... -
Chameleon Street
Directed by Wendell B. Harris Jr. | 95 mins | 1989
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1990 but criminally underseen for decades, the sole feature by Wendell B. Harris Jr.—a canny, inventive, and remarkably assured comedy based on the incredible escapades of real-life con artist William... -
A Screaming Man
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | 91 mins | 2010
The first film from Chad to feature in the Cannes competition, where it was awarded the 2010 Jury Prize, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s affecting, postcolonial father-son story is set against the backdrop of civil war, but flouts war film conventions. Har... -
Grigris
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | 100 mins | 2013
The dancefloor is where 25-year-old Souleymane, nickname Grisgris, comes into his own—an electric, commanding presence, even with his paralyzed leg. But when his beloved stepfather falls gravely ill, Grisgris—played with verve by non-professional... -
And When I Die I Won't Stay Dead
]Directed by Billy Woodberry | 89 mins | 2015
Assembled from archival footage, new interviews, and readings from such figures as Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, this high-spirited screen portrait of the late African American Beat poet and bon vivant Bob Kaufman is given an appropriately nimble, jazzy f... -
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... -
Green White Green
Directed by Abba Makama | 102 mins | 2016
Not quite Nollywood: this ebullient feature debut—named for the colors of the Nigerian flag—puts a cannily satirical spin on a coming-of-age tale. When three friends, each from one of the nation’s major ethnic backgrounds, decide to make a movie, they wre... -
I Am Not a Witch
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 exploitation done with dazz... -
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... -
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 ... -
Black Mother
Directed by Khalik Allah | 77 mins | 2018
Allah trains his eye on Jamaica, the land of his mother’s birth, using the progression of a pregnancy as a structural outline. Mysterious and sensual, rich and rhythmic, it’s a mesmerizing symphony of a film, embodying both the spiritual reverence and con... -
The Lost Okoroshi
Directed by Abba Makama | 95 mins | 2019
What’s the opposite of Afrofuturism? In Abba Makama’s lively and comedic low-budget fable, Raymond, a disenchanted Lagos security guard, wakes up as a masked mass of shimmying purple raffia: he’s been transformed into a traditional Igbo spirit. No longer a... -
The Inheritance
Directed by Ephraim Asili | 87 mins | 2020
Asili’s feature debut is a vivacious, fascinating, fierce and funny ensemble piece set almost entirely inside a West Philadelphia house in which a collective of Black artists and activists have convened, twining together their scripted attempts to arrive... -
The Black Sea
Directed by Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden | 93 mins | 2024
A compassionate, convivial, and deeply humane improvised comedy from Moselle ("The Wolfpack", "Skate Kitchen") and co-director Harden, inspired by the latter’s own experiences, "The Black Sea" stars Harden—also providing original ...
