Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project

Directed by Ousmane Sembène • 1966 • Senegal, France
Starring M'Bissine Thérèse Diop

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 h...

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 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 Pierre Chenal • 1951 • United States, Argentina
Starring Richard Wright, Gloria Madison, Willa Pearl Curtis

One of the most controversial novels of its day, Richard Wright’s “Native Son” (first published in 1940) exposed the injustices of urban African American life through the eyes ...

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 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 Billy Woodberry • 2015 • United States

Legendary Beat visionary Bob Kaufman considered poetry a key to human survival, an idea made all the more legitimate by the longevity it is granted: the things he saw, heard, tasted, felt, and, most of all, thought were preserved in his work. Em...