Black Lives
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Hairat
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Jessica Beshir • 2017 • Ethiopia
Yussuf Mume Saleh journeys nightly into the outskirts of the walled city of Harar to bond with his beloved hyenas, a ritual he has practiced for over thirty-five years. Shot in black and white, HAIRAT is a meditation on this uniquely symbiotic relatio...
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Farewell 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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Portrait of Jason
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1967 • United States
Starring Jason HollidayOn 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,...
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Directed by Billy Woodberry
1 season
One of the leading figures of the LA Rebellion—the new wave of Black American independent cinema that emerged from UCLA’s film school in the 1970s and ’80s—Billy Woodberry created one of the movement’s defining works with his neorealist masterpiece BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, an aching portrait of...
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Burning an Illusion
Movie
Directed by Menelik Shabazz • 1981 • United Kingdom
Starring Cassie McFarlane, Victor Romero Evans, Beverley MartinMade 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...
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Afrofuturism
1 season
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, Afrocen...
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Compensation
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...
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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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Mandabi
Movie + 4 extras
Directed by Ousmane Sembène • 1968 • Senegal
Starring Makuredia Guey, Yunus Ndiaye, Isseu NiangThis 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,...
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Rude
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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Documentaries 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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Directed 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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The Watermelon Woman
Movie + 11 extras
Directed by Cheryl Dunye • 1996 • United States
Starring Cheryl Dunye, Guinevere Turner, Valarie WalkerThe wry, incisive debut feature by Cheryl Dunye gave cinema something bracingly new and groundbreaking: a vibrant representation of Black lesbian identity by a Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye s...
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Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves
Movie + 4 extras
Directed by William Greaves • 1968 • United States
Starring William Greaves, Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don FellowsIn 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...
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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...
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Drylongso
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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Short 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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Directed 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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Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)
Movie + 7 extras
Directed by Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri • 2020 • Nigeria
Starring Jude Akuwudike, Temi Ami-Williams, Tomiwa EdunThis 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...
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Cane River
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Horace Jenkins • 1982 • United States
Starring Richard Romain, Tommye Myrick, Carol SuttonWritten, produced, and directed by the late, trailblazing director Horace B. Jenkins and crafted by an entirely African American cast and crew, this luminous, recently rediscovered landmark of ...
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Daughters of the Dust
Movie + 1 extra
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 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...
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Civic
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...