Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1967 • United States
Starring Jason Holliday

On the night of December 2, 1966, Shirley Clarke and a tiny crew convened in her apartment at the Hotel Chelsea to make a film. For twelve straight hours, they filmed the one-and-only Jason Holliday as he spun tales, sang,...

Directed by William Greaves • 1972 • United States

Best known for his avant-garde meta-documentary SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM, William Greaves was also the director of over one hundred documentary films, the majority focused on African American history, politics, and culture. NATIONTIME is a report o...

Directed by Larry Bullard and Carolyn Johnson • 1978 • United States

Through a bold mix of narrative and documentary techniques, directors Carolyn Johnson and Larry Bullard explore the experiences of Black families in American society. Shuffling between day-to-day scenes of life at home, school,...

Directed by Michelle Parkerson • 1980 • United States

This lively film is an unforgettable portrait of legendary jazz vocalist Betty Carter. Refusing to bow to commercial demands throughout her long career, Carter forged an alternative criteria for success—including founding her own recording co...

Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1980 • United States

In 1972 and ’73, Ulysses Jenkins and the collective from Venice, California, known as Video Venice News documented the Watts Summer Festival—a major Black cultural event established in 1966 to commemorate the Watts Rebellion that jolted the Los ...

Directed by Kathleen Collins • 1982 • United States
Starring Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones

One of the first feature films directed by an African American woman, Kathleen Collins’s LOSING GROUND tells the story of a marriage between two remarkable people, both at a crossroads in their lives...

Directed by George T. Nierenberg • 1982 • United States

One of the most acclaimed music documentaries of all time is a joyous, funny, deeply emotional ode to gospel music and African American culture. Featuring the father of gospel, Thomas A. Dorsey; its matron, Willie Mae Ford Smith; and earth-...

Directed by Bill Duke • 1984 • United States
Starring Damien Leake, Alfre Woodard, Moses Gunn

Originally broadcast on PBS’s “American Playhouse” in 1984, the stirring first feature from actor and filmmaker Bill Duke explores the little-known story of an African American migrant’s struggle to bui...

Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African America...

Directed by Charles Burnett • 1997 • United States

Charles Burnett cannily blends documentary and dramatic action with this searing, savagely ironic tale of a bank employee reduced to living out of his car, in a character study that doubles as a compassionate portrait of Los Angeles’s homeless c...

Directed by Ephraim Asili • 2020 • United States

After nearly a decade exploring different facets of the African diaspora—and his own place within it—Ephraim Asili makes his feature-length debut with this astonishing ensemble work set almost entirely within a West Philadelphia house inhabited by...

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 Saul J. Turell • 1979 • United States

Saul J. Turell's Academy Award-winning documentary short Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, narrated by Sidney Poitier, traces his career through his activism and his socially charged performances of his signature song, "Ol' Man River."

Directed by Fronza Woods • 1981 • United States
Starring Fannie Drayton

A sixty-five-year-old cleaning woman for a professional dancers’ exercise studio performs her job while telling us in voice-over about her life, hopes, goals, and feelings. A challenge to mainstream media’s prevailing stereo...

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 Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold • 2016 • United States
Starring Ricky Goldman, Richard Warner, Ryan Leach

WE DEMAND tells the story of the anti–Vietnam War movement from the perspective of James R. Roebuck, a Northern-born African American man who studied at the Universi...

Directed by Garrett Bradley • 2019 • United States

Taking as its starting point the recently rediscovered Bert Williams feature LIME KILN CLUB FIELD DAY (1913)—the first known film to feature an all-Black cast—Garrett Bradley’s extraordinary new short imagines an entire lost lineage of African A...