When all of your time and energy is devoted just to staying alive, what is the point of any of this? This rediscovered classic doesn’t have answers but wants to show you people asking the same questions.
Category Archives: Black Directors
SANKOFA (1993)
A movie about the way people live under slavery, about Africans connecting to their roots, and also maybe time travel?
CAR WASH (1976)
A small but really interesting comedy about the workers on one long day at a car wash, with an ultra-famous disco track for a title song.
TONGUES UNTIED (1989)
A documentary featuring the voices of Black gay men, which in 1989 was enough almost to turn Washington upside down.
LOSING GROUND (1982)
A very low-budget 1980s film with concerns far more esoteric than your average movie, which wouldn’t be rediscovered until decades later.
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991)
A unique film about the Gullah culture on the coast of South Carolina, with a beautiful visual sense and an insistence on discursive storytelling.
SUPER FLY (1972)
A well-pitched exercise in peak blaxploitation style more than an actual movie, with an all-timer of a soundtrack.
CROOKLYN (1994)
Spike Lee’s semiautobiographical depiction of his own childhood feels “true,” but really rubs me the wrong way.
HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE (1987)
Somewhere between a social satire and sketch comedy resides this weird late-80s time capsule that I thought was funny but not necessarily notable.
THE LEARNING TREE (1969)
The first ever studio movie from a Black director tells the semi-autobiographical story of its director growing up in 1920s Kansas, and I was actually pretty impressed with it as a movie.