Leaving August 1

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 ...

Leaving August 1

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...

Leaving August 1

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 s...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Amos Poe | 70 mins | 1976
Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character in "Breathless" (1960) thought he was Humphrey Bogart; Duncan Hannah’s character in this proto-No Wave work—a restless poseur slash photographer named Rico—thinks he’s Jean-Paul Belmondo. Released the same year...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Bette Gordon | 100 mins | 1983
A young woman lands a job as a cashier at a downtown porno theater, and soon finds herself inexorably drawn towards what’s happening onscreen—as well as other troubling fantasies. One of the great independent films of the ’80s, featurin...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and Kévin Manach | 4 mins | 2011
With its pack of flexing, thrusting figures, cold and white as if carved of marble, some handless or footless but still animated by amorous intentions, this transfixing, techno-set short evokes the surrealist imagery of G...