Directed by Bridgett M. Davis • 1996 • United States
Starring Jake-Ann Jones, Ron Cephas Jones, Patricia DeArcy

A long-unseen jewel of 1990s Black independent filmmaking, Bridgett M. Davis’s fearless exploration of Black female agency centers on Cicely (Jake-Ann Jones), the daughter of a former ...

Directed by C Prinz • 2024 • United States

Through an ecstatic fusion of monologue, music, and dance, this at once lusciously stylized and emotionally raw collaboration between actor-musician Jeremy Pope and filmmaker C Prinz explores and expands notions of Black masculinity as it confronts the ...

Directed by Anthony Harvey • 1966 • United Kingdom
Starring Shirley Knight, Al Freeman Jr., Frank Lieberman

Adapted from the explosive one-act play by Amiri Baraka, this intense chamber drama remains as provocative today as it was in 1966. In an empty New York City subway car, a sexually audacio...

Directed by Darol Olu Kae • 2023 • United States

The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (The Ark) has been a legend in Los Angeles’s avant-garde jazz community for over sixty years. But since the death of its founder, pianist and composer Horace Tapscott, the band has spent the last three decades ebbi...

Directed by Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri • 2020 • Nigeria
Starring Jude Akuwudike, Temi Ami-Williams, Tomiwa Edun

This revelatory, award-winning debut feature from codirec­tors (and twin brothers) Arie and Chuko Esiri is a heartrending and hopeful portrait of everyday human endurance in Lagos, Nig...

Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • 2019 • Lesotho, South Africa
Starring Mary Twala, Makhaola Ndebele, Jerry Mofokeng

With a poet’s eye for place, light, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday existence, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese crafts a meditation on the concept of homeland and a transcen...

Directed by William Greaves • 1968 • United States
Starring William Greaves, Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows

In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE, the pioneering William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving...

Directed by Dwayne LeBlanc • 2022 • United States
Starring Barrington Darius

This graceful, deeply atmospheric short follows Booker (Barrington Darius) as he returns to South Central LA after several years away. Confined to the interior of his car, we watch as he interacts with the people and pl...

Directed by Julie Dash • 1991 • United States
Starring Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbara O. Jones

Julie Dash’s rapturous vision of black womanhood and vanishing ways of life in the turn-of-the-century South was the first film directed by an African American woman to receive a wide release. In ...

Directed by Adepero Oduye • 2017 • United States
Starring Adepero Oduye

In this soul-stirring short featuring stunning cinematography from Bradford Young, PARIAH actor Adepero Oduye takes the stage as the great Nina Simone for an intimate, defiant performance.

Directed by Ekwa Msangi • 2020 • United States
Starring Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme Lawson

In her luminous feature debut, filmmaker Ekwa Msangi chronicles a broken family’s journey to wholeness with empathy and insight. Seventeen years after his family was separated by the civil wa...

Directed by Ousmane Sembène • 1968 • Senegal
Starring Makuredia Guey, Yunus Ndiaye, Isseu Niang

This second feature by Ousmane Sembène was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language—a major step toward the realization of the trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker’s dream of creating a cinema by,...

Directed by Ayoka Chenzira • 1994 • United States
Starring Kim Weston-Moran, Victoria Gabrielle Platt, Mizan Nunes

A rediscovered treasure of independent cinema, this incisive comedic drama follows Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt), a teenager coming of age in Brooklyn, as she looks to two...

Directed by Menelik Shabazz • 1981 • United Kingdom
Starring Cassie McFarlane, Victor Romero Evans, Beverley Martin

Made in 1981, the first feature by the pioneering Barbados-born British filmmaker Menelik Shabazz marked a coming-of-age for Black British cinema. This hard-edged, wholly absorbing...

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 Zeinabu irene Davis • 1999 • United States
Starring John Earl Jelks, Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana Cobb

A poignant portrait of Deaf African Americans and the complexities of love at both ends of the twentieth century, Zeinabu irene Davis’s film is a groundbreaking story of inclusion and...

Directed by Jessica Beshir • 2021 • Ethiopia, United States, Qatar

A sublime work of trance-state cinema, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic immersion in the world of rural Ethiopia, a place where one commodity—khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once p...