Zeinabu irene Davis’s documentary compiles a trove of interviews with visionary directors Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and more that provides an overview of the L.A. Rebellion movement. Screening with a special work-in-progress short film by Jérémie Danon and Kiddy Smile.

Wrongly imprisoned, Charles Murray (Marlo Monte) seeks to wreak vengeance on the detective who framed him, and on the systemic racism of the legal structures that allowed him to do so.

In the mold of Shaft and James Bond, Joe Bullet’s hero fights the saboteurs who hope to undermine his soccer team in an upcoming championship game. This South African Apartheid-era film, one of the first to feature an all-Black cast, was banned by the government after just two screenings.

Passing Through follows a talented jazz saxophonist who, recently released from prison, hopes to establish an artist-owned musical collective—to the chagrin of the mob-affiliated crooks controlling the music industry.

Using newly discovered footage from the recording of a 1969 French television interview with the legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis has constructed a gripping behind-the-scenes documentary; a subtle yet searing exposé of casual racism; and a chance to see one of the monumental geniuses of 20th-century music at work.

Ethiopian-born director Haile Gerima tracks the experiences of a Black mother living in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood as she grapples with the imprisonment of her Vietnam vet husband and navigates the bureaucratic tangles of public assistance.

In the mountains of Lesotho, an 80-year-old widow resolves to defend the spiritual heritage of her community following the news that provincial officials intend to resettle her village, flood the entire area, and build a dam.

When a solitary hitchhiker (Leon Isaac Kennedy) is charged with the murder of a white man following a dispute over a sex worker, he is swiftly jailed and must adapt to the fraught new reality of his life as a prisoner.

Paying homage to the tradition of the griot in West African culture, this original vision from breakout Ivory Coast filmmaker Philippe Lacôte tells the story of a pickpocket (Koné Bakary), newly arrived at a correctional facility in the Ivorian capital of Abidjan, who, in order to stay alive, must keep his fellow inmates entertained with wild tales over the course of a night.

Haile Gerima’s stirring account of the challenges and upheavals faced by Black Vietnam vets centers on a soldier who struggles with newfound disenchantment and alienation as he attempts to reconnect with the American way of life he once inhabited.

Depicting a too-little-known tragedy from the immediate post-WWII period in Senegal, Camp de Thiaroye was banned in France for more than a decade, yet the film endures as one of cinema’s most precise portraits of both war and colonial racism.

A young filmmaker returns home to Washington D.C. after many years away to discover that his old neighborhood is no longer recognizable, and many of his old friends have met with a tragic fate. Screening with Shirikiana Aina’s (Merawi Gerima’s mother) Brick by Brick.

Set in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Billy Woodberry’s lone narrative feature trains a keen eye on the psychological ravages of underemployment and economic discrimination—and sensitively attends to the intimate dynamics of a marriage in crisis.

Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Moonlight is a carefully wrought adaptation of James Baldwin’s penultimate novel, set in Harlem in the early 1970s. Jenkins’s deeply soulful film stays focused on the emotional currents between parents and children, couples and friends.

Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger remains one of the finest films to capture the Black experience in modern America. Executive producer Glover stars as Harry Mention, a drifter from the South who visits an old acquaintance now living with his family in Los Angeles—but Harry’s knack for mischief creates powerful rifts throughout the household.

A wealthy woman returns to her home village, and offers the inhabitants a vast sum in exchange for the murder of the local man who seduced and abandoned her when she was young in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s freeform adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit.

The first film directed by an African American woman to receive a national theatrical release, Julie Dash’s fiction feature debut is a lyrical meditation on the American experience of diaspora.

Winner of the Best Emerging Director award at the Locarno Film Festival, ND/NF alum Denise Fernandes’s stunning feature debut is a beguiling coming-of-age fable that continues her emotionally precise inquiry into diasporic experiences of displacement and belonging.

Programmer Claire Diao and a panel of filmmakers, scholars, and curators explore the many ways in which the L.A. Rebellion’s formal and thematic interventions continue to shape how Black lives are depicted in cinema and the media today.