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 Texas and his subsequent emergence as an American cultural pioneer and world-class composer and performer. Among those who contribute to the film are William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Buckminster Fuller, Don Cherry, Yoko Ono, Charlie Haden, Robert Palmer, Jayne Cortez, and John Rockwell.
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...
