Black Lives

Black Lives

Share
Black Lives
  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)

    Movie + 7 extras

    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 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...

  • Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami

    Movie

    Directed by Sophie Fiennes • 2017 • United Kingdom
    Starring Grace Jones

    This electrifying journey through the public and private worlds of the legendary Grace Jones blends eye-popping musical performances with intimate personal footage, all brimming with Jones’s bold aesthetic. A larger-than-lif...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • James Baldwin On-Screen

    1 season

    Towering literary lion, fierce social critic, and inimitable cultural icon James Baldwin opened up a new space for the frank discussion of race, sexuality, and identity in American society. He also left behind a dynamic cinematic legacy, as seen in these portraits that capture his electrifying pr...

  • Keeping Time

    Movie

    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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Alma’s Rainbow

    Movie

    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...

  • Farewell Amor
    Movie + 6 extras

    Farewell Amor

    Movie + 6 extras

    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...

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves

    Movie + 4 extras

    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...

  • Hairat
    Movie + 1 extra

    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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Faya dayi
    Movie + 5 extras

    Faya 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...

  • Inspired by Marlon Riggs

    1 season

    In 1994, Marlon Riggs died from AIDS at the tragically young age of thirty-seven. Riggs’s untimely passing robbed the world of an artist of uncommon vision and empathy, but not of his work’s ability to galvanize and inspire future generations. This program comprises a selection of stylistically a...

  • 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 ...