MARLON RIGGS, BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T, 1995
The final film by filmmaker Marlon Riggs, BLACK IS…BLACK AIN'T, jumps into the middle of explosive debates over Black identity. White Americans have always stereotyped African Americans. But the rigid definitions of "Blackness" that African Americans impose on each other, Riggs claims, have also been devastating…
ANS WESTRA, SELECTED WORKS
Born in 1936 in Leiden, Netherlands, Ans first arrived in Aotearoa in 1957 at the age of twenty-one. From the 1960s onwards, she spent long periods of time travelling around the country as a full-time freelance documentary photographer, working mainly for the Department of Education and Te Ao Hou…
CRAIG HIGHBERGER, SUPERSTAR IN A HOUSEDRESS, 2004
Jackie Curtis is not a drag queen. Jackie is an artist. A pioneer without a frontier." -- Andy Warhol. Superstar in a Housedress examines the life and legend of Warhol transvestite superstar Jackie Curtis who was a poet, playwright, performer, and one of the great personalities of his time...
JOEL MEYEROWITZ, POP
Pop chronicles the journey of three generations of Meyerowitz men on a road trip from Florida to the Bronx, in exploration of their familial roots…
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MARSHA P. JOHNSON, 2017
Victoria Cruz investigates the mysterious 1992 death of black gay rights activist and Stonewall veteran, Marsha P. Johnson. Using archival interviews with Johnson, and new interviews with Johnson's family, friends and fellow activists…
OZIER MUHAMMAD, HARLEM
Chicago-born, Muhammad is the grandson of Nation of Islam Founder Elijah Muhammad. Coming of age in that famous family of Black Muslim leaders — itself spotlighted in an array of news, commentary and pictures — he picked up jazz and a Yashica film camera around the same time…
THOMAS ALLEN HARRIS, THROUGH A LENS DARKLY, 2014
The first documentary to explore the role of photography in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People probes the recesses of American history through images that have been suppressed, forgotten, and lost…
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, 2022
Fearless documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras’s career-long pursuit of truth and justice finds powerful expression in an epic story of art, activism, and survival…
PARIS IS BURNING, JENNIE LIVINGSTON, 1990
Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene…
MARLON RIGGS, COLOR ADJUSTMENT, 1992
In this documentary, Marlon Riggs carries his landmark studies of prejudice into the Television Age. COLOR ADJUSTMENT traces 40 years of race relations through the lens of prime time entertainment, scrutinizing television's racial myths and stereotypes…
ANA MENDIETA, FUEGO DE TIERRA, 1987
Released two years after the artist’s death, this compelling documentary tracks Mendieta’s life from her childhood in Cuba and tumultuous early years in the United States through her later success in New York and abroad…
THE ROOM OF SILENCE, ELOISE SHERRID, 2016
“The Room of Silence,” is a short documentary about race, identity and marginalization at the Rhode Island School of Design. Based on interviews conducted by myself and the campus organization Black Artists and Designers, this film contains well under a third of the stories we collected in March 2016, and an unknown fraction of the stories belonging to students we didn’t have a chance to meet with…
LARRY SULTAN, THE VALLEY
The cast and crew have gathered in the front yard of a ranch-style house, a few blocks from where I went to high school in the San Fernando Valley. Women in six-inch heels sink into the lawn; men push around camera equipment, anxious about losing the light…
SUSAN MEISELAS, CARNIVAL STRIPPERS, 1972-1975.
From 1972 to 1975, I spent my summers photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease for small town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. As I followed the girl shows from town to town, I photographed the dancers' public performances as well as their private lives…
TONGUES UNTIED, 1989, MARLON RIGGS
Made, in director Marlon Riggs’s own words, to “shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference,” this radical blend of documentary and performance defies the stigmas surrounding Black gay sexuality in the belief that, as long as shame prevails, liberation cannot be possible….