By Ade Adeniji Always in Season explores the history of lynching through the mysterious 2014 death of Lennon Lacy while also looking at historical reenactments of lynching, prompting some to question the value of conjuring up the past. The specter of lynching, though, has been depicted in American popular culture for decades, including in film …
Filmmaker Explores First Steps Toward Justice and Reconciliation
Independent filmmaker Jacqueline Olive, who has worked in non-fiction filmmaking for years and co-directed and co-produced the award-winning hour-long documentary, Black to Our Roots (PBS WORLD), makes her feature documentary directing debut with the searing Always in Season, which was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. A …
Billie Holiday’s Searing “Strange Fruit” Still Has the Power to Startle
By Nick Dedina There are often false narratives we tell ourselves so that we can simplify, and beautify, the past and erase aspects of the present that we are uncomfortable with. Take the view that the olden times glowed with a rosy hue, and that people were more innocent way back when. When filmmakers and …
The Challenge of Making a Film About Racist Relics
Filmmaker and teacher Chico Colvard’s first feature doc, Family Affair, premiered at Sundance and was the first film acquired by Oprah Winfrey for her cable channel, OWN. The searingly personal documentary explored his family’s own troubled history that ultimately had a message of forgiveness and resilience. While his new film Black Memorabilia is less personal, it maintains …
HBCU Grads Share Their Stories of Campus Life
Graduates of Historic Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are proud alums, and in connection with the Independent Lens film Tell Them We Are Rising, which tells the 170 years—and rising—history of HBCUs, we found a few who were happy to tell their own stories of life on an HBCU campus. These are just a sampling of …
How “I Am Not Your Negro” Filmmaker Reopened James Baldwin’s “House”
The worldly Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck and his family fled the Duvalier dictatorship in 1961 and found asylum in the Democratic Republic of Congo, before Peck finished his schooling in the United States, France, and Germany. Currently living in both France and the U.S., Peck has been given numerous Human Rights Watch awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in …
Stanley Nelson Reveals the Real Black Panther Party
Filmmaker Stanley Nelson, who won an Emmy for the PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till, three Emmys for Freedom Riders, and made an acclaimed film about Marcus Garvey, has for years aimed his probing but fair-minded lens on civil rights history. Along the way he realized he hadn’t really seen a film that covered the full and fascinating …
Breaking Barriers on Stage: African American Ballet Dancers Who Made History
As we learn in A Ballerina’s Tale, Nelson George’s new documentary about Misty Copeland [February 8; check local listings], Eurocentric standards of body shape, muscle tone, and skin color excluded dancers who didn’t fit the wan mold demanded of prima ballerinas. All that changed in the summer of 2015, when Misty Copeland, a rising star already transcending the rarified …
Black Family History Through a Lens
A wonderful companion piece to Thomas Allen Harris‘s new film Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People is his Digital Diaspora Family Reunion project — a roadshow connecting communities and history through family photographic archives. Read more about the project in this Documentary Magazine piece, which accurately sums it up as using “the power of interactive …
Thomas Allen Harris Goes Through a Lens Darkly
Filmmaker Harris — whose films and installations have been featured at prestigious film festivals as well as museums and galleries including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the Corcoran Gallery, Reina Sophia, and the London Institute of the Arts — talked to us about his own relationship with photography and what he hopes viewers will gain from seeing Through a Lens Darkly.
Black History Month: From the Independent Lens Archives
Our programming aims to celebrate black history more than just during the month February, but Black History Month is certainly a great time to pause and reflect on African American history both distant and recent. We’ve collected some of our favorite Independent Lens films that delve into different aspects of black history and culture through the …
‘Green Book’ Helped Keep African Americans Safe on the Road
Hardly anyone knows about The Green Book now, but from 1936 to 1964, it was an essential publication for African Americans who hoped to travel safely. The book listed businesses that welcomed blacks during a time when segregation and Jim Crow laws often made travel difficult — and sometimes dangerous.