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 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 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 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 ...

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...

Directed by Brad Bennett, Chris Haley • Documentary • 2021 • 40 minutes

Throughout the South, vast numbers of African-American gravesites and burial grounds for enslaved persons have been lost or are disappearing through neglect and nature reclaiming the solemn tombstones and markers. Recently, ...

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 ...

Directed by Alain Kassanda • Documentary • 2020 • 41 minutes

Kassanda’s freewheeling urban portrait follows two young men, Fred and Akin, as they navigate the crowded roadways of Ibadan, Nigeria’s third largest city. Engineering graduate Fred is beginning a new job as a taxi driver, while Akin p...

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” ...

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...

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...

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)...

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 Emma Christopher, Ph.D. • Documentary • 2014 • 79 minutes

THEY ARE WE is the story of a remarkable reunion, 170 or so years after a family was driven apart by the ravages of the transatlantic slave trade. In Central Cuba, proud members of the Ganga-Longoba, a small Afro-Cuban ethnic ...

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...

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...

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 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 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 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 George Nierenberg • Documentary • With Lionel Hampton, Bunny Briggs, Chuck Green, Howard "Sandman" Sims • 1979 • 59 minutes

The golden age of tap dancing spanned the first half of the twentieth century, but by the 1950s, the form fell to the likes of rock 'n' roll and modern dance. I...

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 Bro...

Directed by Claire Mollard and Magali Chirouze • Documentary • 2013 • 52 minutes

Kigali Shaolin Temple is a kung-fu club in Rwanda started by a group of orphans from the genocide. They find fulfillment in passing on their skills and teaching young Rwandans the values of sharing, tolerance and mu...

Directed by Carl Bidleman • Documentary • 2020 • 52 minutes

NO TIME TO WASTE celebrates legendary 98-year-old park ranger Betty Reid Soskin's inspiring life, work and urgent mission to restore critical missing chapters of America's story. The film follows her journey as an African American woman...