Spotlight on Black Cinema

Spotlight on Black Cinema

Films celebrating Black stories and Black creators from around the world.

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Spotlight on Black Cinema
  • Alone Together

    Directed by Ari Marcopoulos | 24 mins | 2021
    Marcopoulos’s vital document of jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, filmed in an empty gallery with three cameras recording the raw behind-the-scenes set-up, captures the avant-garde legend in all of his improvised splendor, his poetry reading and a...

  • An Open Window

    Directed by Khady Sylla | 52 mins | 2005
    After an unsatisfactory attempt to make a film about the numerous mentally ill people who filled the streets of Dakar back in 1994, Sylla, in her own words “fell ill and crossed to the other side, seeing what others don’t see.” Now “living the experience f...

  • A Single Word

    Directed by Khady Sylla and Mariama Sylla | 63 mins | 2014
    Begun by Sylla and completed by her sister, Mariama, after Khady’s death in 2013, "A Single Word" connects the essay film to the oral historical tradition of the griots—West African storytellers, musicians, and poets who act as repositori...

  • Colobane Express

    Directed by Khady Sylla | 52 mins | 1999
    Losing ground to more modern forms of transit today, the colorfully painted “car rapide” minibuses that criss-cross the crowded streets and avenues of Dakar at breakneck speed carrying passengers and merchandise have been icons of the city since first appe...

  • Fear of a Black Hat

    Directed by Rusty Cundieff | 88 mins | 1993
    Overshadowed somewhat at the time of its release by another gangsta rap mockumentary send-up of the same year, the Chris Rock vehicle "CB4," Cundieff’s shoestring-budget feature debut gets just as many laughs at a fraction of the price, following sociol...

  • Finding Christa

    Directed by Camille Billops and James Hatch | 55 mins | 1991
    An affecting yet unsentimental portrait of motherhood, Camille Billops’s collaboration with husband James Hatch captures her reunion with the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption in 1961, combining candid interviews and archi...

  • Hammons Flute

    Directed by Ari marcopoulos | 9 mins | 1991
    Marcopoulos’s intimate video portrait of David Hammons finds the artist casually resplendent in a beret and mock turtleneck and playing a flute in his cluttered New York studio, surrounded by the ephemera of his practice: paintings, sculpture, and the i...

  • 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...

  • No Place Like Home

    Directed by Perry Henzell | 89 mins | 2006
    Perry Henzell’s follow-up to "The Harder They Come" (1972) very nearly never saw the light of day: funding dried up before its completion, and then the footage was lost. Rediscovered by chance in 2006 and restored in 2019—nearly half a century after the ...

  • Not a Lot to Fear

    Directed by Ari Marcopoulos | 3 mins | 2021
    A multi-generational portrait starring skateboarder, rapper, record producer and artist Sage Elsesser, his mother and grandmother, Marcopoulos’s short film bears witness to the bonds between three eras of Black America, with the elder matriarch, regally...

  • 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 ...

  • The Brother From Another Planet

    Leaving October 1

    Directed by John Sayles | 109 mins | 1984
    New to Earth and fleeing bondage on his own planet, a mute telepath extraterrestrial known only as “The Brother” (Joe Morton)—who has the outward appearance of a twentysomething African American male hits the streets of Harlem—gets a cr...

  • The Harder They Come

    Directed by Perry Henzell | 102 mins | 1972
    Star Jimmy Cliff holds down both the screen and the soundtrack in this rude-boy cult classic, Jamaica’s first feature film, which draws on the legend of folk hero prison escapee Ivanhoe “Rhygin” Martin. Cliff plays Ivan, a bumpkin naif freshly arrived i...

  • 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...

  • The Silent Monologue

    Directed by Khady Sylla | 45 mins | 2008
    Khady Sylla’s docudrama inquiry into the lives—inner and exterior—of Dakar’s female domestics, which employs scenes of improvised street theater, direct-address freestyle screeds, candid interviews, and inner monologue musings with the end of allowing its ...