Black Lives
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Movie + 2 extrasA Well Spent Life
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Les Blank • 1971 • United States
A deeply moving tribute to the Texas songster, Mance Lipscomb, considered by many to be the greatest guitarist of all time.
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MovieHot Pepper
Movie
Directed by Les Blank • 1973 • United States
A companion piece to DRY WOOD that was filmed simultaneously, this is an energetic portrait of the Grammy-winning Creole musician Clifton Chenier, a.k.a. the King of Zydeco. HOT PEPPER brings viewers into the Louisiana juke joints where Chenier plays ...
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1 seasonShort Films by Fanta Régina Nacro
1 season
The first woman from Burkina Faso to direct a narrative film, Fanta Régina Nacro addresses complex social issues with a gently subversive, lightly comic touch. Tackling everything from AIDS and sexual health to gender roles and relations to the evolving place of tradition within the modern world,...
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Movie + 6 extrasFarewell Amor
Movie + 6 extras
Directed by Ekwa Msangi • 2020 • United States
Starring Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme LawsonIn 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...
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Movie + 2 extrasBorn in Flames
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean SatterfieldA blistering rallying cry issued loud, clear, and unapologetically queer, Lizzie Borden’s explosive postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a revoluti...
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Revolutionary Reveries: Four Films by the Sankofa Film and Video Collective
1 season
Founded by Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz, Isaac Julien and Nadine Marsh-Edwards in London in 1983, the Sankofa Film and Video Collective sought to give expression to the complexities of Black British identity in an era of turbulent social and racial strife. Encompassing documen...
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MovieRude
Movie
Directed by Clement Virgo • 1995 • Canada
Starring Maurice Dean Wint, Rachael Crawford, Clark JohnsonJamaican Canadian director Clement Virgo’s landmark debut—the first Canadian dramatic feature made by an entirely Black crew—is a searing, poetic portrait of marginalized souls fighting to overc...
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Movie + 5 extrasThis Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Movie + 5 extras
Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • 2019 • Lesotho, South Africa
Starring Mary Twala, Makhaola Ndebele, Jerry MofokengWith 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...
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1 seasonBlack Debutantes
1 season
Though their voices have historically been marginalized, innovative Black women filmmakers have long broken barriers to tell urgent, powerful, and perceptive stories on-screen. This celebration of pioneering Black women who made an impact with their very first—and in some cases only—feature film ...
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Movie + 2 extrasTori and Lokita
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne • 2022 • France
Starring Pablo Schils, Joely Mbundu, Alban UkajFrom two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT) comes the story of seventeen-year-old Lokita and twelve-year-old Tori (in remarkable debut perform...
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1 seasonDocumentaries by Alain Kassanda
1 season
One of the most exciting emerging voices in African cinema, Congolese French filmmaker Alain Kassanda makes immersive, thought-provoking documentaries that connect the lived experiences of everyday people to larger social and political questions. Turning his observant camera on both his grandpare...
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1 seasonDirected by Moustapha Alassane
1 season
A playfully subversive trailblazer of African cinema, Niger-born Moustapha Alassane created a charmingly lo-fi, irreverently imaginative world all his own. Featuring cartoon frogs, Wild West–style African cowboys, stop-motion puppets, and folkloric heroes, his often witty, iconoclastic fables tak...
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1 seasonDirected by Kathleen Collins
1 season
Trailblazing independent filmmaker Kathleen Collins was just forty-six at the time of her sudden death, but she left behind a rich legacy as a writer, academic, and filmmaker. This program presents her masterpiece LOSING GROUND, a perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads, alongside the s...
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Movie + 3 extrasNothing but a Man
Movie + 3 extras
Directed by Michael Roemer • 1964 • United States
Starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius HarrisMichael Roemer’s groundbreaking first feature, sensitively shot by his close collaborator Robert M. Young, is a still-resonant expression of humanity in the face of virulent prejudice. Made at the...
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1 seasonDirected by Med Hondo
1 season
Among the politically committed African filmmakers who emerged in the postcolonial era, Mauritanian-French firebrand Med Hondo stood as one of the boldest and most provocative voices, forging a fiercely experimental style all his own to examine the historical toll of colonial oppression on genera...
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MovieCome Back, Africa
Movie
Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1959 • United States
Starring Miriam Makeba, Vinah Makeba, Zachria MakebaOne of the bravest and most powerful political films ever made, Lionel Rogosin’s urgent indictment of racial injustice—filmed in secret in 1950s Johannesburg, South Africa—follows a young Zulu ...
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MovieNaked Acts
Movie
Directed by Bridgett M. Davis • 1996 • United States
Starring Jake-Ann Jones, Ron Cephas Jones, Patricia DeArcyA 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 ...
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MovieGod is Good
Movie
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 ...
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1 seasonDirected by Melvin Van Peebles
1 season
Director, writer, composer, actor, and one-man creative revolutionary Melvin Van Peebles jolted American independent cinema to new life with his explosive stylistic energy and unfiltered expression of Black consciousness. Though he undeniably altered the course of film history with the anarchic S...
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Movie + 5 extrasFaya dayi
Movie + 5 extras
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...
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Movie + 8 extrasDrylongso
Movie + 8 extras
Directed by Cauleen Smith • 1998 • United States
Starring Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will PowerA rediscovered treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s DRYLONGSO embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rat...
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1 seasonFrantz Fanon at 100
1 season
Born 100 years ago this July in Martinique, the psychiatrist, political philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon inspired oppressed people worldwide to fight for liberation. His radical assertion of anticolonial consciousness and call to resistance can be felt in landmark cinematic bombshells b...
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MovieCivic
Movie
Directed by Dwayne LeBlanc • 2022 • United States
Starring Barrington DariusThis 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...
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Movie + 10 extrasCompensation
Movie + 10 extras
Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis • 1999 • United States
Starring John Earl Jelks, Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana CobbA 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...
