Coined in 1994 by critic Mark Dery, the term “Afrofuturism” has become an essential framework for art about imagined and alternative Black experiences. As the author Ytasha Womack writes, “Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs.” Afrofuturist ideas have found fertile ground in film, and this expansive series takes viewers on an international, intergalactic journey that stretches back long before the term existed, and far into the future. Spanning animation, documentary, and genre spectacle, these exuberant visions of Black creativity, resistance, and freedom zigzag across the African diaspora from New York to Brasilia to Kinshasa to worlds unknown. Curated by Ashley Clark, the series draws together films from Space is the Place: Afrofuturism on Film, which took place at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015; a sequel planned for 2020 that was canceled due to the pandemic; and a selection of all-new titles, many of them available for streaming for the first time.
This introduction by Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark was recorded in 2020.
Directed by John Coney • 1974 • United States
Starring Sun Ra, Barbara Deloney, Raymond Johnson
Avant-jazz mystic Sun Ra brought his pioneering Afrofuturist vision to the screen with this film version of his concept album. It’s a wild, kaleidoscopic whirl of science fiction, sharp social comment...
Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield
The film that rocked the foundations of the 1980s underground, this postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution. W...
Directed by John Sayles • 1984 • United States
Starring Joe Morton, Daryl Edwards, Steve James
In John Sayles’s witty urban spin on the runaway-slave narrative, a mute extraterrestrial (Joe Morton, in a remarkably expressive performance) crash-lands in Harlem after a spaceship accident and finds...
Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1985 • United States
Starring Ornette Coleman
This freewheeling documentary captures Ornette Coleman’s evolution over three decades. Documentary footage, dramatic scenes, and some of the first music-video-style segments ever made chronicle his boyhood in segregated T...
Directed by Souleymane Cissé • 1987 • Mali
Starring Issiaka Kane, Aoua Sangare
This adaptation of an ancient oral legend from Mali is one the most acclaimed and widely seen African films ever made. An Oedipal story infused with magic, YEELEN is as visually stunning as anything from Hollywood. Se...
Directed by Ngozi Onwurah • 1995 • United Kingdom
Starring Suzette Llewellyn, Saffron Burrows, Felix Joseph
Ngozi Onwurah’s radically ahead-of-its-time Afrofuturist vision WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME made history as the first theatrically distributed British feature directed by a Black woman. Neve...
Directed by John Akomfrah • 1996 • United Kingdom
John Akomfrah, cofounder of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, crafted this experimental blend of sci-fi parable and essay film, which also serves as an essential primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism. Inter...
Directed by Cauleen Smith • 2001 • United States
In this experimental hybrid between science fiction and noir, Cauleen Smith explores Black alienation and outsiderhood via the story of two aliens stationed on Earth searching for kinship and a sense of purpose.
Directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo • 2005 • Cameroon
Starring Adèle Ado, Dorylia Calmel, Emile Abossolo M'bo
Cameroonian auteur Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s outré sci-fi satire is a blazingly Afrofeminist vision in which a pair of supernatural lesbian call girls use their powers to smash a futuristic Camero...
Directed by Monique Walton • 2010 • United States
Starring Sade Jones
A woman obsessed with extraterrestrials and UFO sightings begins to question her own ethnic, cultural, and planetary origins.
Directed by Monique Walton • 2011 • United States
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a mysterious box appears in the backyard of three siblings—a portal that may offer an escape from their surroundings.
Directed by Kibwe Tavares • 2011 • United Kingdom
Tensions erupt among a group of young robots attempting to survive the daily grind.
Directed by Cédric Ido • 2011 • France
Starring Jacky Ido, Cédric Ido, Min Man Ma
In an all-too-plausible future ravaged by climate change, rival clans must fight for the remaining natural resources in this striking Burkinabé blend of samurai adventure, spaghetti western, and doomsday science-fi...
Directed by Terence Nance and Blitz Bazawule • 2011 • United States
Starring Edward Dankwa, Marcus Quarshie, Helena Yaboah
A young boy embarks on a journey through Accra, Ghana, to find his estranged father in this fable-like short made to accompany an album by hip-hop artist Blitz the Ambassador.
Directed by Terence Nance • 2012 • United States
Starring Terence Nance, Namik Minter, Chanelle Aponte Pearson
Terence Nance announced his arrival as one of the most exciting voices in American independent cinema with his bracingly original, endlessly inventive debut feature. With arresting insi...
Directed by Kibwe Tavares • 2013 • United Kingdom, Tanzania
Mbwana and his best friend Juma are two young men with big dreams. These dreams become reality when they photograph a gigantic fish leaping out of the sea and their small town blossoms into a tourist hot spot as a result. But for Mbwana...
Directed by Cédric Ido • 2013 • France, Burkina Faso
Starring Sabourou Bamogo, Harouna Ouedraogo, Sidiki Diarra
Burkina Faso in 1985 is a country in the throes of revolution. Manu, a young boy who loves comics, tags along with his big brother, Albert. When Albert decides to undergo a magic ritua...
Directed by Adirley Queirós • 2014 • Brazil
A formally inventive sci-fi voyage through the past, present, and future of racial struggle in Brazil, WHITE OUT, BLACK IN interweaves the stories of two survivors of a 1986 police shooting living in Ceilândia—a historically oppressed Black city just o...
Directed by Miguel Llansó • 2015 • Spain, Ethiopia
Starring Daniel Tadesse
In a dazzlingly imaginative vision of a postapocalyptic Ethiopia, a hapless scavenger finds himself launched on a surreal adventure involving a mysterious UFO, witches, Santa Claus, Nazi knights, and more. Conjuring a loo...
Directed by Terence Nance • 2015 • United States
This hypnotically surreal dance film is set to a single by the psychedelic rock band the Dig.
Directed by Adebukola Bodunrin and Ezra Claytan Daniels • 2016 • United States
Experimental cinema meets the aesthetics of the graphic novel in this surreal outer-space odyssey to the edge of consciousness and the cosmos.
