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,...

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his featur...

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 Raven Jackson • 2018 • United States
Starring James Vincent, Jordan-Amanda Hall, Duygu Eser

In six chapters, the “stinging moments” that mark the lives of various women are evoked with striking, poetic intimacy.

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.

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 ...

Directed by Haley Elizabeth Anderson • 2020 • United States
Starring Kadence King

One Sunday at church, twelve-year-old Amber experiences her first kiss, a moment of innocence that triggers a series of awakenings: sexual, emotional, and religious.

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 Camille Billops and James Hatch • 1982 • United States

One of the many films that Camille Billops and James Hatch made centering on Billops’s family, SUZANNE, SUZANNE presents a devastating portrait of the artist’s niece, haunted by the abuse she suffered as a child and the passivity...

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...

Directed by Franco Rosso • 1980 • United Kingdom, Italy
Starring Brinsley Forde, David N. Haynes, Trevor Laird
Exclusive streaming premiere

A long-lost reggae classic reemerges. Suppressed following its Cannes premiere for fear that it would stoke racial tension, Franco Rosso’s incendiary portra...

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 Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield

The film that rocked the foundations of the 1980s underground, this postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution. W...

Directed by Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie • 2013 • United States

In 2001, Lenny Cooke was the most hyped high school basketball player in the country, ranked above future greats LeBron James, Amar’e Stoudemire, and Carmelo Anthony. A decade later, he had never played a minute in the NBA. This qui...