Black Lives

Black Lives

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Black Lives
  • Nothing but a Man
    Movie + 3 extras

    Nothing but a Man

    Movie + 3 extras

    Directed by Michael Roemer • 1964 • United States
    Starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius Harris

    Michael 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...

  • Drylongso
    Movie + 8 extras

    Drylongso

    Movie + 8 extras

    Directed by Cauleen Smith • 1998 • United States
    Starring Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will Power

    A 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...

  • Dutchman

    Movie

    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...

  • Mandabi
    Movie + 4 extras

    Mandabi

    Movie + 4 extras

    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,...

  • Ornette: Made in America

    Movie

    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 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...

  • Frantz 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...

  • Milford Graves Full Mantis

    Movie

    Directed by Jake Meginsky with Neil Young • 2018 • United States
    Starring Milford Graves

    This portrait of renowned percussionist and founding pioneer of avant-garde jazz Milford Graves finds him exploring his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity. The film draws the viewer through th...

  • My Brother’s Wedding

    Movie

    Directed by Charles Burnett • 1983 • United States
    Starring Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett

    Recut and restored twenty-five years after its ill-fated premiere, Charles Burnett’s second feature is an eye-opening revelation—wise, funny, heartbreaking, and timeless. Pierce Mundy w...

  • Portrait of Jason
    Movie + 1 extra

    Portrait of Jason

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1967 • United States
    Starring Jason Holliday

    On the night of December 2, 1966, Shirley Clarke and a tiny crew convened in her apartment at the Hotel Chelsea to make a film. For twelve straight hours, they filmed the one-and-only Jason Holliday as he spun tales, sang,...

  • I Am Not a Witch

    Movie

    Directed by Rungano Nyoni • 2017 • Zambia, United Kingdom
    Starring Maggie Mulubwa, Nellie Munamonga, Dyna Mufuni

    The acclaimed debut feature from Rungano Nyoni is a daring, sharply satiric feminist fairy tale set in present-day Zambia. When nine-year-old orphan Shula (Margaret Mulubwa) is accuse...

  • Pressure
    Movie + 1 extra

    Pressure

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Horace Ové • 1976 • United Kingdom
    Starring Herbert Norville, Oscar James, Frank Singuineau

    The fiction debut by esteemed Trinidadian-British documentarian Horace Ové marked a watershed in the history of British cinema. This gripping and immersive drama was the nation’s first feature...

  • Losing Ground
    Movie + 2 extras

    Losing Ground

    Movie + 2 extras

    Directed by Kathleen Collins • 1982 • United States
    Starring Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones

    One of the first feature films directed by an African American woman, Kathleen Collins’s LOSING GROUND tells the story of a marriage between two remarkable people, both at a crossroads in their lives...

  • Directed by Charles Burnett

    1 season

    A true trailblazer of independent cinema, Charles Burnett has brought images of Black American life to the screen with authenticity, empathy, and stirring poetry. Bringing together landmarks like KILLER OF SHEEP and TO SLEEP WITH ANGER, lesser-known gems such as THE GLASS SHIELD and THE ANNIHILAT...

  • Black Panthers
    Movie + 1 extra

    Black Panthers

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Agnès Varda • 1970 • United States

    Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive sho...

  • Bless Their Little Hearts

    Movie + 1 extra

    Directed by Billy Woodberry • 1984 • United States
    Starring Nate Hardman, Kaycee Moore, Angela Burnett

    Scripted and shot by Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry’s slice-of-life revelation is a key masterpiece of the LA Rebellion, the black independent-cinema renaissance that emerged from UCLA’s film...

  • Pioneers of African American Cinema

    3 seasons

    Among the most fascinating chapters of cinematic history is that of the so-called “race films” that flourished in the U.S. between the 1920s and ’40s. Unlike the “black cast” films produced within the Hollywood studio system, these films not only starred African Americans but were funded, written...

  • Black 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 ...

  • Rude
    Movie

    Rude

    Movie

    Directed by Clement Virgo • 1995 • Canada
    Starring Maurice Dean Wint, Rachael Crawford, Clark Johnson

    Jamaican 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...

  • Celebrate Black History

    1 season

    The story of Black Americans is, in many ways, the story of America itself. Though the African American experience has long been relegated to the margins of the big screen, a vital cinematic legacy endures thanks to the work of pioneers like Oscar Micheaux (WITHIN OUR GATES), Charles Burnett (KIL...

  • Directed by Morgan Quaintance

    1 season

    Wormholes to more wormholes, the continually surprising audiovisual essays of Morgan Quaintance draw incisive connections between the most seemingly disparate of subjects—see how his quietly radical MISSING TIME moves, almost imperceptibly, from a consideration of New Hampshire alien abductions a...

  • The Magic of Milford Graves

    1 season

    A rhythm-shattering avant-jazz percussionist and a sui generis martial artist, sculptor, herbalist, and all-around cosmic Renaissance man, the late free-jazz shaman Milford Graves lived a life as liberated and unclassifiable as his music. Including the appropriately kaleidoscopic feature document...

  • The Black and the Green

    Movie

    Directed by St. Clair Bourne • 1983 • United States, United Kingdom

    In a vital career forged in the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, activist documentarian St. Clair Bourne chronicled overlooked Black American cultural histories with an incisive, illuminating eye. In THE BLACK AND THE GREEN, B...

  • Two Shorts by Dwayne Leblanc

    1 season

    In his acclaimed short films, Caribbean American director Dwayne LeBlanc has shown himself to be a rising talent already in full control of mood, tone, and visual texture. His mesmerizing CIVIC and its gorgeous follow-up, NOW, HEAR ME GOOD, each center on a young man named Booker (played by Barri...