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 John Akomfrah • Documentary • 2010 • 94 minutes
Structured as an allegorical fable set between 1949 and 1970, THE NINE MUSES is comprised of nine overlapping musical chapters that mix archival material with original scenes. Together, they form a stylized, idiosyncratic retelling of t...
Directed by Ben Crosbie and Tessa Moran • Documentary • 2013 • 27 minutes
Fate of a Salesman is an intimate portrait of a way of life on the verge of disappearing. In its 60th year of business, Men's Fashion Center in Washington, DC has come to represent identity, legacy and redemption for sales...
Directed by Leah Mahan • Documentary • 2014 • 56 minutes
COME HELL OR HIGH WATER follows the painful but inspiring journey of Derrick Evans, a Boston teacher who returns to his native coastal Mississippi when the graves of his ancestors are bulldozed to make way for the sprawling city of Gulfpor...
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 Isaac Julien, Mark Nash • Drama • With Colin Salmon, Halima Daoud, Noirin Ni Dubhgaill, Stuart Hall, Françoise Verges • 1995 • 72 minutes
FRANTZ FANON: BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK explores for the first time on film the pre-eminent theorist of the anti-colonial movements of this century. ...
Directed by Mo Morris • Documentary • With Edythe Boone • 2018 • 56 minutes
Long before Black Lives Matter became a rallying cry, Edythe Boone embodied that truth as an artist, an educator, and a great-grandmother. When a personal tragedy ignites a national outcry, everything that Edythe has wor...
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 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 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 Andrew Rossi • Documentary • With Okwui Okpokwasili • 2017 • 91 minutes
From director Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times, The First Monday in May) comes an electrifying portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and her acclaimed one-woman show, Bronx Gothic. R...
Directed by Chivas DeVinck • Documentary • 2018 • 99 minutes
Syl Cheney-Coker (author of The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) and Niyi Osundare (recipient of the Nigerian National Merit Award, Nigeria’s highest recognition for distinguished academic an...
Directed by Chantal Akerman • Documentary • 1999 • 70 minutes
Inspired by her love of William Faulkner and James Baldwin, renowned director Chantal Akerman had planned to produce a meditation on the American South. However, just days before she was to begin filming, James Byrd, Jr. was murdered ...
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 Andrew James • Documentary • With James "Jack Rabbit" Jackson, Deris Solomon, Minister Malik Shabazz, Derionna Watkins, Lorraine Ray • 2020 • 101 minutes
In a rapidly changing America where mass inequality and dwindling opportunity have devastated the black working class, three men f...
Directed by Joe Angio • Documentary • With Spike Lee
Mario Van Peebles
St. Clair Bourne
Gil Scott-Heron • 2005 • 85 minutes
Melvin van Peebles’ remarkable life story reveals an artist and a man whose groundbreaking impact on film, politics and pop culture remains, forty-five years after the rele...
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.
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 • 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 • 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 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 Jennifer Dworkin • Documentary • 2003 • 155 minutes
Jennifer Dworkin’s groundbreaking documentary LOVE & DIANE presents a searingly honest and moving examination of poverty, welfare and drug rehabilitation in the United States today. Filmed in New York City over a five-year period, D...
Directed by Cheryl Dunye • Documentary • With Cheryl Dunye, Zoie Strauss, Paula Cronan, Wanda Freeman, Shu Leah Cheang, • 1994 • 80 minutes
Vilified by conservatives in Congress, defended by major newspapers, and celebrated by audiences and festivals around the world as one of the most provocati...
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...
