Directed by Charles Burnett • 1983 • United States
Starring Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett
Recut and restored twenty-five years after its ill-fated premiere, Charles Burnett’s second feature is an eye-opening revelation—wise, funny, heartbreaking, and timeless. Pierce Mundy works at his parents’ South Central dry cleaners with no prospects for the future and his childhood buddies in prison or dead. With his best friend just getting out of jail and his brother busy planning a wedding to a snooty upper-middle-class black woman, Pierce navigates his conflicting obligations while trying to figure out what he really wants in life.
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...
Directed by Charles Lane • 1989 • United States
Starring Charles Lane, Nicole Alysia, Tom Alpern
An unsung miracle of American independent filmmaking, SIDEWALK STORIES reworks Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick classic THE KID for 1980s New York. Writer-director Charles Lane casts himself as a modern-d...
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 1...
