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James Baldwin: From Another Place
Directed by Sedat Pakay • Documentary • With James Baldwin • 1973 • 12 minutes
Set in Istanbul, the film opens with a surprisingly candid scene of Baldwin leisurely awakening in his bedroom. Sedat Pakay, a Turkish filmmaker who studied with Walker Evans, is known for his photographic portraits o...
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Tall As the Baobab Tree
Directed by Jeremy Teicher • Drama • With Dior Ka, Oumoul Ka • 2012 • 82 minutes
Coumba and her little sister Debo are the first to leave their family’s remote African village, where meals are prepared over open fires and water is drawn from wells, to attend school in the bustling city. But when...
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Belly of the Beast
Directed by Erika Cohn • Documentary • With Kelli Dillon, Cynthia Chandler • 2020 • 82 minutes
When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal sterilizations in California’s women’s prisons, they wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections...
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12 O'Clock Boys
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...
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When Claude Got Shot
Directed by Brad Lichtenstein • Documentary • With Claudaire Motley, Victoria Davison, Nathan King • 2021 • 94 minutes
This unscripted feature follows five years in the life of Claude Motley as he tries to recover mentally and physically from being shot in the face by carjacker Nathan King, a 15...
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The Shooting on Mole Street
Directed by Mosco Boucault • Documentary • 1998 • 90 minutes
On March 1, 1996, 15-year-old Shafeeq Murrel was killed on the street in South Philadelphia — innocently caught in the crossfire between rival pairs of crack dealers out for revenge. Shafeeq’s murder was one of 435 in Philadelphia that...
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Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris
Directed by Terence Dixon • Documentary • With James Baldwin • 1970 • 27 minutes
Shot in Paris, a city in which Baldwin lived for nine years after leaving New York — a decision he has described “as a matter of life and death.” The early sequences find Baldwin uncooperative, even hostile to the B...
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The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry
Directed by Adam Bhala Lough, Ethan Higbee • Documentary • With Lee “Scratch” Perry, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Paul McCartney, The Clash, Bunny Wailer, Marcus Garvey, Carl Bradshaw, Eve, Benicio Del Toro • 2008 • 95 minutes
THE UPSETTER tells the wild, weed-fueled story of Lee “Scratch” Perry — a ...
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Marcus
Directed by Patrick Savey • Documentary • With Marcus Miller, Herbie Hancock, George Benson, Miles Davis • 2014 • 97 minutes
Patrick Savey plunges us into Marcus’s world, capturing the New York roots of the legendary bass player, following his path like the pebbles of Tom Thumb, as he meets mast...
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Tongues Untied
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...
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Bronx Gothic
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...
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A Reckoning in Boston
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 ...
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Love & Diane
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...
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You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South
Directed by Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver • Documentary • With Myles Horton, May Justice, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Bernice Robinson • 1985 • 85 minutes
Lucy Massie Phenix's You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South is about individuals who have dared to change the world for the be...
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Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace
Directed by Jeff Dupre • Documentary • With Kehinde Wiley • 2014 • 40 minutes
The artist behind Barack Obama’s presidential portrait, Kehinde Wiley is known for his vibrant, larger-than-life reinterpretations of classical portraits featuring young Black men. “Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace” ...
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Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
Directed by Tamra Davis • Documentary • With Jean-Michel Basquiat • 2010 • 88 minutes
Centered on a rare interview that director and friend Tamra Davis shot with Jean-Michel Basquiat more than 20 years ago, this film chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of the young artist. In the crime-ridden ...
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When A Farm Goes Aflame
Directed by Jide Tom Akinleminu • Documentary • 2021 • 112 minutes
A young Nigerian leaves his village at the end of the 1960s and goes to Denmark to study. There he meets his future wife. Together they move to Nigeria and start a family. But 16 years later, circumstances in a politically tense ...
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Good White People
Directed by Jarrod Cann & Erick Stoll • Documentary • 2016 • 16 minutes
In the Spring of 2001, the African-American community of Over-the-Rhine in downtown Cincinnati arose in protest after unarmed 19-year-old, Timothy Thomas, was killed by a white officer named Steven Roach. In the years follow...
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Let the Fire Burn
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 ...
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My Brother's Wedding
Directed by Charles Burnett • Drama • With Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett, Ronnie Bell • 1983 • 86 minutes
In 1983, after many long months of shooting, Charles Burnett sent his rough-cut of My Brother’s Wedding to his producers. Ignoring his request to finish the editing of t...
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Bless Their Little Hearts
Directed by Billy Woodberry • Drama • With Nate Hardman, Kaycee Moore • 1983 • 80 minutes
Searching for steady work, Charlie (Nate Hardman) views his chronic unemployment as a kind of spiritual trial. But selling a few catfish can’t sustain a family of five while his wife, Andais (Kaycee Moore)...
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Cane River
Directed by Horace B. Jenkins • Drama • With Tommye Myrick, Richard Romain, Carol Sutton • 1982 • 104 minutes
Written, produced, and directed by Emmy Award-winning documentarian, Horace B. Jenkins, and crafted by an entirely African American cast and crew, CANE RIVER is a racially-charged love s...
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Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You.
Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • Documentary • 2021 • 76 minutes
As we float through the streets of Lesotho, following a cross-bearing woman and an omnipresent figure wearing wings, a tumultuous history of sorrow and suffering between the motherland and its people unravels. The through lin...
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64 Day Hero: A Boxer's Tale
Directed by Franco Rosso • Documentary • 1985 • 92 minutes
In this compelling and thought-provoking documentary, sports writer and novelist Gordon Williams uses archive footage, as well as interviews with family members and friends, to investigate the troubled life of the mixed-race British boxi...