Directed by Brian Storm • Documentary • 2008 • 18 minutes
Decades before American Idol and America's Got Talent captured the attention of millons on TV, the world renowned Apollo Theater in Harlem started hosting its popular Amateur Night, which launched the careers of Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, and Jimi Hendrix, among many other famous African American artists. Still as vibrant and popular today as it was in 1934, one night a week the stage becomes an amateur's battleground, where emotions run high and dreams are both made and broken.
Up Next in African-American Docs
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Althea
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...
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'63 Boycott
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, ...
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Quest
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 ...
