Black Lives

Black Lives

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Black Lives
  • Three Short Films by Ja’Tovia Gary

    1 season

    The aesthetically dynamic, shape-shifting films of artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary combine everything from heavily processed 16 mm archival materials to TikTok videos and woman-on-the-street-style interviews to put Black women and their lived experiences, past and present, in dialogue with one...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Tori and Lokita
    Movie + 2 extras

    Tori and Lokita

    Movie + 2 extras

    Directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne • 2022 • France
    Starring Pablo Schils, Joely Mbundu, Alban Ukaj

    From two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT) comes the story of seventeen-year-old Lokita and twelve-year-old Tori (in remarkable debut perform...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Caribbean Activist Cinema

    1 season

    Born from a period of intense political upheaval, these radical Caribbean films spotlight vital stories of workers’ movements, decolonial struggle, and liberation from economic exploitation and violent oppression. Including urgent, on-the-ground accounts of revolutionary movements (HAITI: THE WAY...

  • Naked Acts

    Movie

    Directed by Bridgett M. Davis • 1996 • United States
    Starring Jake-Ann Jones, Ron Cephas Jones, Patricia DeArcy

    A long-unseen jewel of 1990s Black independent filmmaking, Bridgett M. Davis’s fearless exploration of Black female agency centers on Cicely (Jake-Ann Jones), the daughter of a former ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Born in Flames
    Movie + 2 extras

    Born in Flames

    Movie + 2 extras

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

    A blistering rallying cry issued loud, clear, and unapologetically queer, Lizzie Borden’s explosive postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a revoluti...