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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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...

Directed by Alex Rappoport • Documentary • With Peter Bradley • 2024 • 86 minutes

When filmmaker Alex Rappoport met then-79-year-old abstract artist Peter Bradley in early 2020, Bradley hadn't sold many paintings or had a major show in over four decades - yet he still painted every day in a ship...

Directed by Robert Mugge • Documentary • With Gil Scott-Heron • 1983 • 79 minutes

BLACK WAX is a musical-political entertainment film produced and directed by Robert Mugge. It centers on the late African American poet-singer-songwriter Gil Scott-Heron - the man Melody Maker called "the most dang...

Directed by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss • Documentary • 2023 • 74 minutes

THE FIVE DEMANDS is a riveting story about the student strike that changed the face of higher education forever. In April 1969, a small group of Black and Puerto Rican students shut down the City College of New York, a...

Directed by Andrew Garrison, Nancy Bless and Noland Walker • Documentary • 2007 • 55 minutes

THIRD WARD TX is the story of how Project Row Houses uses the tools of design, art and architecture to transform two blocks of “shotgun” houses familiar across the South into exhibition space, classrooms...

Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1995 • 87 minutes

Having grappled with the stereotypes imposed upon black people by white America, Riggs turned his attention to another fraught issue: the definitions of “blackness” that African-Americans impose on each other. Weaving together poetry, co...

Directed by Theo Rigby • Documentary • 2014 • 7 minutes

The Caretaker is a short film about the relationship between an immigrant caretaker and an elderly woman in the last months of her life. Joesy, a Fijian immigrant, works long hours providing live-in care for 95-year-old Haru Tsurumoto. Thro...

Directed by Cheryl Fabio • Documentary • 2023 • 93 minutes

Seen primarily through the eyes of women and children of color living through housing insecurity in California's Alameda County, A Rising Tide aims to identify how and why homelessness occurs.

The film juxtaposes the perspectives of var...

Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1991 • 8 minutes

Marlon Riggs' experimental music video politicizes the homoeroticism of African-American men. With images—sensual, sexual, and defiant—and words intended to provoke, Anthem reasserts the self-evident right to life and liberty in an era of...

Directed by Mike Mascoll • Documentary • 2020 • 54 minutes

An educated citizenry is said to be the backbone of democracy and a crucial bulwark in an increasingly interconnected and hyper-competitive world. Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act helped weave equal education for all ...

Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1992 • 38 minutes

Through music, poetry and quiet, at times, chilling self-disclosure, five positive black gay men speak of their individual confrontation with AIDS, illuminating the difficult journey black men throughout America have made in coping with ...

Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1986 • 58 minutes

Unflinching, unsettling, and essential, this Emmy-winning documentary examines the devastating legacy of black stereotypes throughout American history, from the slavery era to the present. Drawing on a wide variety of media—from minstrel...

Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1991 • 88 minutes

An essential companion to Ethnic Notions, Color Adjustment explores black representation in the age of primetime television. Deconstructing cultural touchstones from Amos ’n’ Andy to The Jeffersons to The Cosby Show, this cogent and prov...

Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1990 • 10 minutes

An exploration of Black gay male desires and dreams. Affirmations starts with an affectionate, humorous confessional and moves on to a wish for empowerment and incorporation.