Directed by Brad Lichtenstein • Documentary • With Susan Sarandon • 2001 • 90 minutes

Attica. Like Watergate and Vietnam, it is an icon of recent history. Gov. Rockefeller's brutal re-taking of the prison - a nine-minute, 1600-bullet assault that took the lives of 29 inmates and 10 guards - put ...

Directed by Lofty Nathan • Documentary • 2013 • 76 minutes

The 12 O'CLOCK BOYS are a notorious urban dirt bike pack in Baltimore -- popping wheelies and weaving at excessive speeds through traffic, the group impressively evades the hamstrung police. In Lotfy Nathan's wild, dynamic documentary (t...

Directed by Sarah Ema Friedland • Documentary • With Gralen Stephon Vereen, Mickey "Bonesaw" Taylor,the Garden State Roller Derby Girls • 2014 • 53 minutes

Branch Brook Park Roller Rink in Newark, New Jersey is one of the few remaining urban rinks of its kind. This concrete structure is nestled ...

Directed by Michael Honey • Documentary • 2016 • 38 minutes

LOVE & SOLIDARITY is an exploration of nonviolence and organizing through the life and teachings of Rev. James Lawson. Lawson provided crucial strategic guidance while working with Martin Luther King, Jr., in southern freedom struggles ...

Directed by Alan Govenar • Documentary • 2025 • 73 minutes

Perhaps no town has experienced the racial divide in America as much as Jasper, Texas. The lynching of James Byrd Jr. in 1998 revealed the deep division between the Black community and their white counterparts. The legacy of slavery runs...

Directed by Laura Checkoway • Documentary • 2017 • 29 minutes

Edith Hill and Eddie Harrison got married in Virginia at ages 96 and 95. Dancing at the honky-tonk and going to church, their newlywed life is filled with affection, prayer and faith. Since tying the knot, both Edith and Eddie have ex...

Directed by Gordon Quinn • Documentary • 2017 • 30 minutes

On October 22, 1963, more than 250,000 students boycotted the Chicago Public Schools to protest racial segregation. Many marched through the city calling for the resignation of School Superintendent Benjamin Willis, who placed trailers, ...

Directed by Rex Miller • Documentary • 2014 • 83 minutes

Althea Gibson broke records on and off the tennis court. A truant from the rough streets of Harlem, Gibson emerged as a most unlikely queen of the highly segregated tennis world in the 1950s. A sharecropper's daughter, Gibson's family migr...

Directed by Jonathan Olshefski • Documentary • 2017 • 105 minutes

​Filmed with vérité intimacy for nearly a decade, Quest is the moving portrait of the Rainey family living in North Philadelphia.

Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, Christopher “Quest” Rainey and his wife Christine’a ...

Directed by Alan Govenar • Documentary • With Tyler Stovall, Monique Y. Wells, Thomas Allen Harris, Karim Toure, Akin Babatunde • 2020 • 86 minutes

For more than a century, African American artists, authors, musicians and others have traveled to Paris to liberate themselves from the racism of th...

Directed by Andrew Piddington • Documentary • With David Driskell • 1991 • 52 minutes

David Driskell, the pathbreaking art history professor and artist, is the focus of HIDDEN HERITAGE: THE ROOTS OF BLACK AMERICAN PAINTING. He made it his life mission to trace the work of Black artists from the ...

Directed by James Rutenbeck • Documentary • 2022 • 84 minutes

Kafi Dixon and Carl Chandler enrolled in a rigorous night course in the humanities at a community center in their Boston neighborhood of Dorchester.

Kafi, 44, sharp, witty and restless, dropped out of school at 15. She had her first ...

Directed by Kelly Duane de la Vega, Katie Galloway • Documentary • 2016 • 83 minutes

In 2012, California amended its 'Three Strikes' law--one of the harshest criminal sentencing policies in the country. The passage of Prop. 36 marked the first time in U.S. history that citizens voted to shorten ...

Directed by Anne de Mare • Documentary • 2018 • 76 minutes

A tight-knit group of friends travel to Cumberland County, North Carolina—the 2016 'posterchild' for voter suppression—intent on proving that the big idea of American democracy can be defended by small acts of individual citizens. What t...

Directed by Shola Lynch • Documentary • With Shirley Chisholm, Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler, Bobby Seale • 2004 • 77 minutes

Recalling a watershed event in US politics, this compelling documentary takes an in-depth look at the 1972 presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman...

Directed by Chea Prince • Documentary • 2003 • 56 minutes

In the autumn of 1965, sharecroppers Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter enrolled the youngest eight of their thirteen children in the public schools of Drew, Mississippi. Their decision to send the children to the formerly all white schools wa...

Directed by Jacques Goldstein • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes

In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a major exhibit called “Harlem On My Mind.” There was just one thing wrong: the show had no work by African-American artists.

The “Harlem on My Mind” fiasco is emblematic ...

Directed by Thomas Allen Harris • Documentary • 2014 • 92 minutes

The first documentary to explore the American family photo album through the eyes of black photographers, Through a Lens Darkly probes the recesses of American history to discover images that have been suppressed, forgotten and lo...

Directed by Robert Clem • Documentary • With J.W. Alexander, Ira Tucker • 2018 • 87 minutes

How They Got Over tells the story of how Black gospel quartet music became a primary source for what we would call rock and roll, and in the process helped to break down racial walls in 1950s America.

Be...

Directed by Antonino D'Ambrosio • Documentary • 2022 • 87 minutes

Directed by award-winning filmmaker Antonino D'Ambrosio, this is the long overdue documentary about the legendary Roberta Flack. Of course she is well known the world over for “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and "Killing Me Soft...

Directed by Jason Osder • Documentary • 2013 • 95 minutes

In the astonishingly gripping Let the Fire Burn, director Jason Osder has crafted that rarest of cinematic objects: a found-footage film that unfurls with the tension of a great thriller. On May 13, 1985, a longtime feud between the city ...

Directed by John Akomfrah • Documentary • 1996 • 45 minutes

John Akomfrah, director of Seven Songs of Malcolm X, returns with an engaging and searing examination of the hitherto unexplored relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, intergalactic travel, and rapidly progressing c...

Directed by Shirley Clarke • Documentary • 1967 • 108 minutes

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

Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1989 • 55 minutes

The seminal documentary on Black gay life, Emmy Award-winning director Marlon T. Riggs’ 1989 Tongues Untied uses poetry, personal testimony, rap and performance (featuring poet Essex Hemphill and others), to describe the homophobia and r...