Directed by Billy Woodberry

Directed by Billy Woodberry

4 Episodes

One of the leading figures of the LA Rebellion—the new wave of Black American independent cinema that emerged from UCLA’s film school in the 1970s and ’80s—Billy Woodberry created one of the movement’s defining works with his neorealist masterpiece BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, an aching portrait of an ordinary family buckling under marital and economic pressures. Since then, Woodberry has forged his own distinctive brand of archival documentary filmmaking in searching, politically trenchant works like AND WHEN I DIE, I WON’T STAY DEAD and his latest, MÁRIO, a portrait of the Pan-African thinker and activist Mário Pinto de Andrade, founder of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

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Directed by Billy Woodberry

4 Episodes

  • Bless Their Little Hearts
    1:25:43
    Bless Their Little Hearts
    Episode 1

    Bless Their Little Hearts

    Episode 1

    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...

  • The Pocketbook
    12:55
    The Pocketbook
    Episode 2

    The Pocketbook

    Episode 2

    Directed by Billy Woodberry • 1980 • United States
    Starring Ray Cherry, David Jenkins, Ella “Simi” Nelson

    Adapted from Langston Hughes’s classic short story “Thank You, Ma’am,” Billy Woodberry’s UCLA student film follows a young man reflecting on his life after a robbery gone wrong.

  • Marseille après la guerre
    10:34
    Marseille après la guerre
    Episode 3

    Marseille après la guerre

    Episode 3

    Directed by Billy Woodberry • 2005 • United States

    Through striking black-and-white photos, director Billy Woodberry creates a poetic portrait of the dockworkers who struggled together in Marseille after World War II and reflects on the political awakening of one of them—future “father of Africa...

  • A Story from Africa
    43:16
    A Story from Africa
    Episode 4

    A Story from Africa

    Episode 4

    Directed by Billy Woodberry • 2019 • Portugal, United States

    In this powerful archival documentary, director Billy Woodberry draws from rare early-twentieth-century photographs to shed light on the tragic history of the Portuguese colonization of Angola.

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