Spotlight on Black Cinema

Spotlight on Black Cinema

A curated selection of films celebrating Black History Month.

Subscribe Share
Spotlight on Black Cinema
  • Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Sophie Fiennes | 115 mins | 2018
    One doesn’t have to do much to make a film about the towering, tempestuous Jamaican-born Grace Jones visually stunning and frequently outrageous, but Fiennes goes above and beyond in this documentary portrait of the powerful and pan...

  • 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...

  • Personal Problems Pt. 1

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Bill Gunn | 165 mins | 1980
    Bill Gunn, actor, screenwriter, novelist, and the director of art-horror classic Ganja & Hess (1973), teamed with writer Ishmael Reed and producer Steve Cannon to produce what Reed has called a “meta-soap opera,” an exceptional, rough-ed...

  • Personal Problems Pt. 2

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Bill Gunn | 72 mins | 1980
    Bill Gunn, actor, screenwriter, novelist, and director, teamed with writer Ishmael Reed and producer Steve Cannon to produce what Reed has called a “meta-soap opera,” an exceptional, rough-edged ensemble piece exploring Black working-clas...

  • The Connection

    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 direction and the ...

  • 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...