Woman: Film was certainly not a place where mainstream entertainment was reflecting the everyday realities of people of color.

Man: To speak about the L.A.

Rebellion is to speak about a wide variety of imaginations and films that were not inside the imagination of mainstream Hollywood.

Man 2: We weren't anti-Hollywood.

It wasn't even on the radar.

Man 3: We had this burning desire to show different stories.

Man 4: I don't think that Hollywood can hide these histories anymore.

[Theme music] ♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropy; the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture; the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

[Indistinct chatter] Man: We're doing fine now.

OK. Woman: We're doing fine.

This is a nice diffusion, huh?

I applied to UCLA.

It was the only school that I could afford.

When applying, it was very clear that UCLA's film school champions independent voices, and that made sense for me.

It was what I was looking for.

Man 2: OK, I've got a green light from the director.

Let's bring talent to set, please.

Reem Jubran: My aunts and uncles all dabbled in film when they were young but never got to really explore.

They never had that privilege to actually tell their story.

So in one sense, I am in the process of completing their unfinished projects for my family, for our story.

[Film projector clicks] [Film feeding] [Music] Leronn P. Brooks: The filmmakers that emerged from the L.A. rebellion could have only really happened in L.A. [Protestors chant indistinctly] Jacqueline Stewart: They were just forging this path, committed to being artists and supporting each other in being artists.

♪ Bee: Tell me about yourself, Jita-Hadi.

Jita-Hadi: Ain't much to tell, baby.

Jacqueline: One of the things that was so important about the EthnoCommunications program at UCLA is that it was intended to speak to multiple communities and invite multiple communities in to tell their stories.

Interviewer: Do you like to be called an American Indian or a Native American?

Archie Fire Lame Deer: It don't make no difference to me because I know what I am.

Jacqueline: It also gives a deeper understanding of why these community-based voices are so important.

You had black filmmakers supporting Chicano filmmakers and telling Chicano stories and vice versa.

So there's a really, I think, powerful dynamic there that I don't know has been replicated anywhere else.

Man: I remember Larry as this civil rights activist.

And you were political, and I was, like, just getting into politics and radical politics, and you had been kind of, like, a veteran, you know?

Larry Clark: Yeah, I was president of the Black Student Union at Miami University, about ten miles from the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan, just across the border in Richmond, Indiana.

And you were always full of energy.

You always were going.

You know, it was like your feet were hardly touching the ground, you know?

And you had that charisma, you know.

Eddie Wong: We carried that activism into film school because, like, those early years, it was really contentious, you know, not only with the faculty, with other fellow students.

Like, we really stood apart, you know, as like the Third-World students.

And in a lot of ways, we preferred it that way.

Larry: Yeah, we did.

Ha ha!

♪ Jacqueline: The mid- to late 1960s were really a period of reckoning with the possibilities of the civil rights movement, but also this sense of frustration that things were not materially improving for black people, for people of color in general.

Leronn: You really had a generation, a post-proper civil rights generation, the post-Martin Luther King generation, that were really aiming toward a more militant stance, but it was also redefining what black culture meant at that particular moment.

There was an urgency, there was a hunger to have a sort of authentic presence known from black and brown communities.

Jacqueline: There was a real sense of being at a crossroads about, What are the next phases of this movement going to be?

What is it going to take to achieve some kind of equity and a sense of belonging and a sense of empowerment for black people?

And all of that was really affecting college students who were so important in terms of the activism that was taking place at that time.

Luis Garza: If you look at the times that we were at, the countries and civil rights-- mayhem, struggle, Vietnam War is raging, the counterculture is in full bloom.

It's sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

It's driving everybody crazy.

And so you got these clashes between generations primarily and influences that are beginning to shift.

The demographics are shifting, which...continues to this day.

Ben Caldwell: People forget that the Black Power movement was really a multicultural movement.

Luis: Yeah...yeah... Ben: It was Native Americans, Asians, Blacks.

All of us got together and collectively moved toward things or the change wouldn't have happened.

Luis: I come out of the South Bronx.

My family is from northern Mexico/south Texas.

But I was born and raised in New York City.

When I come out to L.A., I ain't never seen so many Mexicans in my life.

[Ben laughing] Luis: So coming out to L.A. in '65, I came out two weeks before the Watts rebellion.

Ben: For me, I was about the only black in a mostly predominant Latino community.

Luis: I think we introduced each other to each other's cultural sensibilities, both from the immigrant parents that we were from and from the first or second generation that we represented.

For me, it was that exploration through film, photography in particular, which is what got me into UCLA and into this program, opened up that whole other sensibility of possibilities.

Ben: That was what I found unique about hanging out with all you guys, when I came to the school here.

Westwood was filled with a lot of bookstores and discussion groups over coffee and things like that.

The school itself was beyond my belief that I was accepted and that it being up here in Bel-Air and, you know, with these million-dollar homes and up here in Westwood.

It was hoity-toity, and the whole--ha ha-- the whole place was kind of like totally different than my world has ever seen.

And then all of us who were considered "ethno," ha ha, all got together and found out how deep our roots were in a sense of commonality.

Moctesuma Esparza: When I got to UCLA in March of '67, I found myself alone and isolated.

There were 30,000 students at that time at UCLA, and I noticed maybe a dozen Mexican-Americans.

And by that point, I had already had a tremendous amount of training and had been part of the social protest movement.

And we had gone into the community and recruited our brothers and sisters, many of whom had been threatened that if they walked out of high school and protested that they would never get any recommendations to go to college.

After the walkouts of March of '68, Elyseo Taylor, who was an African-American professor at UCLA, asked me to be part of the Media Urban Crisis Committee Study that was looking at the role of media in the portrayal of minorities.

The findings were quite clear that the portrayals were negative or nonexistent, and there was a recommendation that there should be an increase in diversity.

So together with Elyseo Taylor, we strategized that we should create a curriculum and recruit Third-World students to completely transform the film school.

We went and occupied Colin Young's office, who was the dean of the film school, and happily, he approved it.

This was an incredible, astonishing time.

And all of a sudden, there was a huge presence in the film school.

African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Chicanos.

And there was this sense that we could actually change things, that something was going to come of this.

Luis: The first incarnation of EthnoCommunication, that first wave that I was part of, you know, there were about 13, 14 of us.

The name of it was Media Urban Crisis, MUC.

So being who we were, we'd play with it, and we said, "We're the mothermuccers.

[Laughter] Ben: We should have kept that name.

Ha ha!

Alile Sharon Larkin: When I got to film school, I never thought of it as art.

And I'm in film school when I think, "Oh, this is art!"

I became an artist because this is everything.

This is visual arts.

This is music, this is writing.

When I found out that there was such a thing as film school, I had to go there.

Stormé Bright Sweet: I was really fascinated, but I was afraid of the camera.

I was always afraid that I couldn't shoot it right and do it right.

And so I was always the director.

I was always telling somebody what to shoot.

And I grew up in a very political family, and we were strongly, strongly encouraged to embrace politics, strongly encouraged to embrace politics.

And UCLA was way different from SC.

Alile: We grew up with the '60s and with Dr. King and all of them on TV and the Panthers.

When I went to USC, I thought I was going there to be, like, the '60s, and that wasn't happening at USC, but it was happening at UCLA.

Stormé: It definitely was happening at UCLA.

But you were in film.

I was in video, so it was a whole different dynamic.

And I did video because video was cheaper to do.

You could erase it, you know.

You could shoot and then erase.

Alile: What I remember most is Project One, and Project One was crazy.

We were in the bullpens, and I bought a camera, a Bauer Super 8 camera.

I did my Project One right away because that was my dream to come to film school and make a film.

[Sound of projector running] ♪ [Music on film soundtrack] Ben: My Project One, I really was learning how to go from still photography to moving film.

So I was going from static to movement.

Woman: Raise the dead... Raise the comeback.

Ben: And I also was highly involved in animation.

So my Project One was a mixture of the two.

I ended up shooting a lot of intervalometer pictures--time lapses and stills and things like that, and I made them move similar to how you'd make them move in animation.

Luis: I think I remember working on the kitchen table on a Super 8 with the cutting and a razor blade, you know, and the chopper and trying to tape these things together.

Eddie: My Project One was, like, I had never done film before, barely shot photographs, knew nothing about what I was going to do.

I was in a panic... but I decided I was going to make a film of my father because it was a difficult subject because I kind of hated the guy.

Eddie, narrating film: I never knew much about my father as a child.

As I grew older, I never really saw him behind his laundryman mask, behind the chink, that stereotypic, docile, quiet, courteous little Chinaman deferring obediently to [Indistinct], the white man.

Eddie: I knew that my father had a different-- different parts of his personality, one that he had to put on a face for white society to survive as a laundryman, but also he had to preserve his dignity by writing poetry, doing calligraphy and all that.

So I knew I had a structure for the film, and then he just allowed me to film a lot to make it happen.

And like, you know, there's, like, tons of errors in the film.

I was learning how to focus a camera when I was shooting... Larry: Yeah!

Right, right... Eddie: So, like, Oh!

You have to focus, zoom in, focus, and then pull out and shoot.

I'd, like, start shooting, go in, and then focus, you know?

So it has a kind of a dreamy quality because of that, you know, out-of-focus look to it, which, you know, worked out OK, but it wasn't good craftsmanship.

And it's only over ten weeks.

So it's like, a really intense process.

You have to, like, crank it out and get it done.

And that kind of put extra pressure on you but also made you finish it, too.

Larry: I'm sitting next to Rufus Howard when you screened your film in Melnitz Hall the first time.

And when you got to the end of it, I remember Rufus Howard-- and he might have told you this.

He said, "The footage you shot of your father-- it looked like a forest when he was going through Kung Fu moves, he said, "Your father looked like a god."

Eddie: Wow...wow... Larry: I agreed with, you know.

So the film was powerful.

That was a really powerful film.

♪ Eddie: Well, a funny story.

You know, I showed him the rough cut, and he didn't like that sequence.

And he said, "My Kung Fu, I made too many mistakes.

You got to reshoot it."

Larry: Yeah.

Eddie: So I had to reshoot and reedit the film because he didn't like his Kung Fu sequence.

So...

He was happy with it in the end.

Larry: That's fair.

[Laughter] ♪ Stormé: "Single Parent Family" is because I grew up in a two-parent home, and I knew a woman who I could never figure out how she did it.

She had three active boys.

I mean, crazy active boys, and they lived across the street from me.

And they were twins.

They were wild hairs.

I am not kidding.

All of 'em wild hairs.

And the mother was so calm, and she had lost her husband.

He had been killed in a trucking accident, and she was the only single parent I ever knew.

So I think that was one of the inspirations.

And then when I finally started the film, I remembered meeting other people who had lost their spouses in my family.

So like, for instance, my father's father was burned up on the railroad.

They put coal in--the whatever the thing was, and he caught fire.

I had just learned that as I was going to UCLA.

And so my grandmother raised, like, five kids by herself.

And I never thought of my grandmother as a single parent.

You don't think like that.

But as I got older, I did.

And so that's why I chose only African-American people for that film.

But that was the inspiration for me.

Sandy Osawa: The curriculum was actually as much as you wanted to make it.

It was up to us, as students, to really take advantage of where we were.

The T.A.

at that time was Yasu.

And he asked me what would I like to do.

I sort of got the idea of trying to look at Native Americans the way others do.

Man: So there was this idea that the Indians were scum, they had to be gotten rid of.

So nowhere in that formula is the idea that the Indians are human and they have their own culture and their own social ways.

That doesn't appear at all, or you couldn't go out and kill them.

Sandy: I had been to several places where they had skeletons at that time--displayed Native American skeletons.

That was quite normal to see in those days, the late '60s.

I wanted to contrast it with the times that we were in, and so the shots that I took were right on campus, a lot of them.

We decided to experiment with the fast cutting.

Woman on "Curios": Now let's do an Indian counting song.

Singers: ♪ One little, two little, three little Indians four little, five little six little Indians Seven little, eight little nine little Indians ten little Indian boys ten little, nine little eight little Indians seven little, six little five little Indians, four little, three little two little Indians, one little Indian boy ♪ [Imitating war cry] ♪ Different woman on film: What is that?

[Different woman laughs] [First woman scoffs] Sandy: At the very end of the "Curios" presentation, we both recall real vividly that we had a standing ovation.

Most everything we've done since then is really looking at images, the way that we're represented and actually the way we are.

♪ Luis: The work that we did back then--you know, simple as it was with Super 8, you know, a 16-millimeter and working with Nagras and Eclair cameras and that kind of equipment that I never had access to.

Ben: I always saw those as imperial tools that I thought I would never have been able to touch.

And I thought that was really hip.

When we had those tools, we realized that it was like we had these Rolls-Royces in our hands that was worth more than our family's home.

[Film projector clicks] [Film feeding] ♪ Eddie: Wow.

None of this was here when we first came to film school in the 1970s.

Alile: I don't see any-- any of our films up here.

Ben: But none of the films, like Jamaa's, all these made 22 million-- they also were made in Hollywood, but their work isn't up here.

Alile: Oh, Charles' "To Sleep With Anger" is up there.

You see Charles.

Wow.

Eddie: These are all major Hollywood productions.

And at the time, UCLA prided itself as the house of the independents.

Larry: EthnoCommunications was an important seed for independent film in this country.

That history is not quite here.

But I'm not surprised because most people don't recognize it.

Ben: All of that is not up here.

And it's just like when we were students.

Alile: That's it.

Eddie: I mean, it's pretty intimidating to be standing in front of your fellow classmates and all the faculty to show your works.

I was lucky that they were well-received.

I believe at the time they were.

You know, it wasn't why I made the films.

It wasn't for them.

It was really for people in the community.

But I was glad to have survived that process.

A lot of people did not.

I mean, it was pretty brutal sometimes.

Ben: I mean, what is that?

"To Sleep With Anger."

To me, the film that he did-- that should probably be up there is "Killer of Sheep," because it was--it's in the National Archives as one of the best films of Black people in the United States about Los Angeles.

Scooter: Why don't you let me borrow your roscoe?

Stan: Man, I don't keep no gun.

[Screen door clicking] Stan's wife: Why you always want to hurt somebody?

Scooter: Who?

Me?

Ben: And then Larry Clark's was nominated as the number-one jazz film that ever was created that documented the ideas of jazz.

Larry: "Daughters of the Dust" should be here because that also was an important film.

It's one of a kind.

There's nothing ever made before "Daughters of the Dust," like that, and there's nothing that's been made since like that.

[Kid vocalizing] [Kid laughs] Reem: A classmate of mine introduced me to Julie Dash and L.A.

Rebellion.

I hope that my work can honor what other directors like Julie Dash exploring her ancestry, exploring very intimate family stories, it gave me so much freedom to tell my story.

Ben: When we walked in here, we never felt welcome.

We felt just like being pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed into the realities that our work was never going to be lasting this way as what they're showing here.

So it's still racist.

♪ Eddie: I mean, this used to be the old production-- the rental office for all the equipment.

And this is where we--this is why we came to film school, to get the equipment.

Alile: We used to check out our equipment.

And Billy Woodberry worked there and Abdul Hafiz worked in the tech office.

Eddie: And we stayed here as long as we could-- years and years--just to get the rental equipment for free as students.

And it's high-quality equipment.

And we just took it out and did our own work in the community with it.

Larry: I remember these steps.

Uh... there was a faculty member/ a professor stealing things from my editing room, stealing reels and using them and not putting them back.

And I caught him red-handed stealing my reels.

So I confronted him and asked him why was he stealing my reels.

And he looked me in the eye, and he said, "I can do anything I want to do."

And so I was wearing these flip-flops.

And so I stepped out of my flip-flops because I was just getting ready to open up a can of whip ass.

And he saw what was coming, and he took off running, and he ran out down these steps, out the front door, into the parking lot, and jumped in his car.

And I haven't seen him since.

♪ Ben: Soundstage one here is really where I had "all of my learning to be a cameraman" class.

Alile: I remember camera class in here.

Everything felt compressed, like you had to get it done.

Larry: I really loved the soundstages because they had flats.

We could build sets, you know.

And it was kind of like a sanctuary because faculty didn't come in.

They weren't allowed in because you controlled the set.

And so it was a real sanctuary.

And so we did a lot of good work, and we used these soundstages a lot.

Alile: We were really about collaboration, but even though we were really about collaboration, it still was too much, you know?

We still had too much to do.

So... Ben: I think that that's what was unique about the experience here.

Also the freedom to be independent.

I think that that's the major thing that they taught us and with the L.A.

Rebellion, and that's the reason we could create our independent movement, because listening to C.Z., that was the real crux of what the school was about at that time.

So we lived it out to its fullest.

We really set up an outside network that really, really worked well for us.

Alile: Yeah.

I can't believe it's been over 40 years.

Yeah.

[Film projector clicks] [Film feeds] Reem: I wanted to make sure that the moments with Bana are captured in a way, maybe slightly... Filmmakers in American film schools 20 years ago worked extremely hard to get to where they are now, and they immensely opened the path for young Palestinian filmmakers like me.

I have established a family of filmmakers and people who want to make films, not to capitalize off of our struggle but to change our narrative and show the world who we actually are.

UCLA handed me an opportunity to get my hands dirty because directing used to be the scariest thing.

This film follows a young woman.

She travels through time via water as a portal, and she ends up in 1930s Palestine, where she spends a few days with her great-grandmother when she was her age, leading up to her arranged marriage wedding night.

I'm telling this story because I have come to a deeper understanding of my relationship with my grandmother in the past few years.

As a Palestinian from the diaspora, this film came to me literally when I inherited her old dresses, the thawb.

They are our traditional costume.

Our elders who were exiled and kicked out from Palestine are our main connection to the place where we belong but also dream of returning one day.

♪ Alile: So there was, like, Teshome's class, "Film and Social Change," where we were introduced to world cinema, and then we just would go crazy and see all the films from all around the world.

Stormé: I was so in love, honestly.

I remember I saw the "Seven Samurai," and I could not believe the photography.

I couldn't believe the costumes and the customs and the horseback riding.

Ohh.

I was just, This is a real film?

[Hoofbeats] [Riders yelling] Larry: We had a lot of discussions about film, and we'd be yelling and screaming at each other about some movie we saw, you know.

If you saw us, you'd think we were arguing about money or some girl or something.

But it was about film, you know.

Eddie: You know, of course, I liked all the classic stuff, like the Kurosawa films and even Italian neorealism.

So that all seeped into my film consciousness, but also the films from the Third World, like from South America, you know, "Hour of the Furnaces," you know, films from Africa, films by European filmmakers against the war, like "Far from Vietnam."

So all these strands entered into kind of my thinking about ways to make film, what film should be about, et cetera.

That wasn't Hollywood exactly, but it was sort of like bringing in all these other influences that would create kind of an alternative cinema.

♪ [Opera singer singing in Spanish on soundtrack] Larry: The films in Africa with very little resources.

The films in Brazil, Cinema Nova films, with very little resources.

So the mode of production was very similar to me, you know.

You never had enough money to make a film, so that didn't stop you.

You just used what you had and had to make your limitations work for you rather than against you.

Man: All right.

All right.

Freeze.

Different man: Freeze!

Now, we've been watching you for the past two years, watching every move you make-- where you live, work.

We even know what you read.

[Film projector clicks] [Film feeding] Moctesuma: We had equipment, and students were making their own films.

And it was in this environment that in our second year, August of 1970, we took on a class project, all the students together, which was to document an antiwar march in East Los Angeles that occurred on August 29, 1970.

So it became an EthnoCommunications project.

So all the African-American students, all the Asian students, all the Chicanos, we all came together, and we said, "We're going to make a documentary about this march."

[Indistinct chanting] Moctesuma: And in 2022, that film was inducted into the Library of Congress Film Registry, one of only about 60 movies up to that time so inducted... [Men singing in Spanish] Moctesuma: which is amazing to me that that student film, which I still cringe when I look at some of the terrible shots and I see a moment in which the boom goes into the shot and another pan that goes nowhere-- just horrifies me.

But at the time, we didn't know any better.

Stormé: My family was so behind me.

I mean, so behind everything, all the crazy stuff that I probably did.

But they were so supportive.

Alile: Well, remember, it was so new.

Because, I mean, we would use our parents' homes and so forth.

And I remember I would shut down their house to go shoot because they had to unplug the refrigerator, they had to unplug everything.

Everybody had to go in one room and close the door while we were shooting, taking over their house.

My whole family was at the shoot of "A Different Image" at the La Brea Tar Pits.

Everybody was there.

But it's like, I'm carrying my nephew in my arms as we're breaking down the lights and all of the equipment.

Larry: We had a lot of community support.

For example, for "As Above, So Below," I needed a restaurant.

So I'm looking at locations, trying to find the right one, you know?

And finally I find the right one.

I don't know the people who run the restaurant.

It's a Black couple.

It's in south central, a husband and wife.

So I walk in and introduce myself.

I'm Larry Clark.

I'm a graduate student at UCLA in the film department.

I'm looking for a location, and they were delighted and happy, and they wanted to help me.

"And, yes, you can use this restaurant," and they had never saw me before.

[Man in restaurant coughing] Worker: Honey, let me get you something hot to drink.

Man: Ain't got no money.

Worker: Never mind that, honey.

Man 2: Hey, you mean he don't have to pay?

Larry: That's just grassroots community support.

We're making the films for and by the community, and there's a lot of stories like that, you know.

Haile Gerima, when he was shooting "Bush Mama," there was a building that had been condemned and people were still living there.

And so we kind of pried the door open, and we shot there for the whole summer.

♪ Singer: ♪ That I can tell by the look in your eyes that you want to cry Breathing the polluted air the smog is everywhere ♪ Haile Gerima: I disagree with many people about the L.A.

Rebellion.

People, for me, we are a failed experiment in my perspective.

When we worked together, we were innovative.

But white filmmakers make films when they're 50, 60.

Charlie cannot get a penny.

So the idea that we don't go to our time of maturity cinematically, content-wise and form, we graduated into a desert.

White kids graduated into an industry.

That's what happened.

♪ Luis: That's part of the politicalization that takes place.

The outbursts, the uprisings that took place across the country, across the world was simply a result of that kind of reaction to the powers that be that just didn't want to let go.

And the only way that they can contest it was to come down on you.

Ben: Why this is interesting, because what happened to us is, you know, that the whole Latino/Chicano/Black movement was going on at the time.

So it grew the focus of the FBI.

Luis: Mm-hmm.

Ben: So at our first screening, a guy by the name of Larry Connell met with us and says, "You know, you guys' films collectively together drew the focus of the State Department.

So we're wanting to know if we could show them all together so we could do a study of it."

And we all collectively said, "Are you paying for it?"

And they said, Yes.

So they bumped up all of our stuff to 16-millimeter.

Luis: Wow.

Woman narrating: We are raised, and this race is a sun, sun, sun, sun... Ben: So that's how my "Medea's" existent because of that craziness, that I'm getting all over the world with that little film.

I think them being evil, like they were, helped save us because all of our Project Ones are still in existence because of that.

♪ Leronn: You would go to UCLA or you'd be involved in these programs.

You'd be involved in the kinds of radical education that came from these programs and people you would meet there.

But Hollywood, as an industry, was not willing to hire black and brown creatives because, you know, L.A. is steeped in segregation.

Jacqueline: You didn't necessarily follow the conventions of Hollywood narrative.

Like, for these path-breaking filmmakers, there was not going to be the possibility of finding a lot of funding or distribution for films that were not intended to exploit a black market.

A lot of the work is about building community.

These are the kinds of films that you should have conversations afterward.

They're to prompt exchange.

And so, you know, that's not what the commercial film industry was about then, and it's not what it's about now.

Eddie: There were people in our program who wanted to go more of a Hollywood route, and they wanted to, you know, get jobs in the industry.

Other people, like myself, wanted to do more community documentary work.

After film school, you have the question of, What do you do?

You know, you can try to make independent film.

It's a real struggle.

Hard to do it by yourself.

So we decided to band together.

So Bob Nakamura, myself, Duane Kubo, Alan Ohashi, we started to form Visual Communications.

Larry: Yeah VC when you were at UCLA.

Eddie: Yeah, it started because Bob had already been working with his brother Norman as a subcommittee of the Japanese American Citizens League, doing some photo projects.

But when we finished film school, we decided to make that transition and try to get grants and do films.

But our whole reason for being was, like, we were going to tell community stories, and we couldn't have survived without community support.

I mean, we showed our student films to churches, community groups.

People donated money to Visual Communications to keep us alive.

And we kind of stuck it out through some hard times.

But, you know, we'd take turns going on unemployment.

And, you know, the funny thing is Bob sat us all down and said, "This is going to be a ten-year process."

You know, "It's not going to be successful right away.

And you're going to, like, suffer for, you know, over ten years."

But, you know, at the time, you know, we couldn't get a job in Hollywood anyway.

We would take a 16-millimeter projector and lug it to a church, school.

One time we went to a parking lot and projected it on a wall.

And, you know, Asian Americans didn't have productions.

They didn't see themselves in anything on TV or major movies except for a few stereotype roles, "Bonanza," that kind of stuff.

And so there was a thirst for seeing these kinds of stories.

So we made a point to go to the community.

We had to find our own audiences.

[Indistinct announcements on PA] Oda: It's only shakuhachi, my flute.

Guard: Hand it over, I said.

Oda: It's my shakuhachi.

It goes with me.

[Announcements on PA] Guard: God damn you.

Mister, I ought to--hand it over now!

♪ Jacqueline: The L.A.

Rebellion filmmakers would not have had access to the conventional modes of film distribution into commercial theaters.

These are filmmakers who got some recognition in Europe, for example, on the festival circuit.

Larry: In 1980, A woman in Paris named Catherine Ruelle brought African-American film to Paris.

Charles was there.

I was there.

And Ben Caldwell was there.

Julie Dash was there.

So after that, there was, like, a demand.

You know, everyone had to do what they were doing in Paris.

So there was one in Berlin, there was one in Italy, there was one in Amsterdam.

And then in 1985, I think it was, Clyde Taylor showed some of our films at the Whitney Museum, and that's where he coined the term "L.A.

Rebellion."

So our films fell into that category of L.A.

Rebellion, which is important because they gave a name.

So then our films come back from Europe and the film criticism changes.

Before they were kind of just lukewarm.

So now they can't say anything.

You know, they can't say anything now because they're coming back from Europe.

You know, the criticism is very different.

Eddie: Of course, they didn't have Sundance then.

They didn't have all these things.

There wasn't going to be a ready home for these products, but we had to make them anyway.

Stormé: After UCLA, you know, I went to law school, right?

Alile: Yes.

Stormé: And the reason I went to law school is because I didn't know one person in film who was making a living.

I'm seeing nobody that I know who is making a living at producing films, you know.

Alile: Hollywood had no place for me.

What I did was created for my son, like with the "Dreadlocks and the Three Bears" video and all of that.

Like, I would write stories for him because it wasn't out there for our children.

Moctesuma: I spent a year trying to get a job in Hollywood, getting meetings with top agents who were interested in what I had done, but no one hired me.

And in '76, I took my savings and partnered up with Alejandro Grattan, and we produced an independent feature with 35-millimeter Panavision cameras.

We shot for five weeks.

Budget was 300,000.

It got a theatrical release, and I lost my shirt.

I didn't make any of the money back.

Almost lost my house.

And I learned a very quick lesson, is that I was in show business and that unless I had a marketing plan and a strategy for how to distribute a movie and have an audience for it, that I was not engaged in a sustainable activity.

Sandy: KNBC was actually looking for a Native American producer.

They asked a number of local community people, "Well, who would you recommend?"

And my name kept coming up because of the UCLA experience.

The executive producer was saying, "Dream up the best thing you can think of, and give me a little treatment on ten shows."

Man: Non-Indians took 13 million salmon from the waterways of Washington while a major tribe, the Muckleshoots, totally harvested 703 fish.

Interviewer: Wow.

Man: And this isn't even enough to feed their families.

Interviewer: Right.

What do you think?

Marlon Brando: Well, I think whatever you can get away with in this country, you're going to get away with.

Sandy: And it was the first Native American ten-part series to be seen on television.

So that was a big breakthrough for Native American media.

You never saw any native person or-- very rare, any minority people taking film classes during that time.

These stories that are being told now, I think, are so important because it's important to learn from history and to see what's possible.

Host: We have attempted to tell and share with you the story of our people as we see it, as it was in the past and as it is now.

The day will come, and soon, when we will stand inside the political, educational, and media forces of this country rather than on the outside looking in.

[Film projector clicks] [Film feeding] ♪ Ben: Haile's films here.

"Passing Through," seeing all of those wonderful films here and in contrast to the kind of way the world was seeing us at that time was really, really phenomenal.

Alile: Yeah, seeing those films here, seeing, of course, "Killer of Sheep."

We went crazy over "Killer of Sheep" when we saw that.

[Dogs barking] Boy: Keep running.

Ben: Overseas, our work did comparable to any of the Hollywood films.

As a matter of fact, I loved it at the Tate Modern when they showed Larry's and our films.

The "Guardian," their whole front page ad on us was, "The group of young ones that took Hollywood on and won."

Most of my films I'm waiting for my children to show them because there's such a stomach punch to society that we're in.

Alile: OK, but don't you think that--don't you think that our stuff is relevant now?

Ben: I just don't want to die before it.

Alile: OK, but, no, but you know what?

You know what, Ben?

Ben: Uh-huh?

Alile: Or they censor us and erase us and then they trot us out.

It took 40 years for a different image to get streamed, so, like, they kind of did that anyway.

So let's call them out on that.

We got censored and erased and then like, so, like, now we're kind of trotted out.

But at the same time, the films are timely now.

They belong to this generation, and this generation is the one that's trotting them out and claiming them.

So he should be fearless, like you already said, they coming from you-- Stormé: You should be fearless.

Ben: "Should be fearless"!

I am fearless.

Alile: No, no, but we just want to see Ben's films.

Stormé: Yeah, we want to see... Alile: in 1409.

Stormé: them right here.

♪ Alile: The whole world is film school now.

Stormé: It is.

Alile: And everyone is a photographer, and everyone is a producer, and everyone is a filmmaker.

You can have your own channel now, so like, it's a whole nother world.

Stormé: It is.

Alile: But for the people who are really intentional about it, I'm going to say they need to have a community and be in community.

Stormé: I agree.

Alile: They cannot be out there on their own.

Stormé: I agree.

Alile: I think that that's what happened to us after we left.

We weren't in community anymore.

And you have to acknowledge yourself because we're constantly erased.

Stormé: Absolutely.

Well, I think the quality, too, just is so important of what we put out.

Alile: I'm just saying we just affirm and celebrate ourselves.

Stormé: I totally agree with that.

Alile: Yeah.

Affirmation, celebration.

We're here.

Stormé: Because if we don't affirm ourselves and if we don't celebrate ourselves, who is?

Alile: Yes.

And I think also we understand that our work is healing.

♪ [Child softly] ♪ Chris: Take care, both of you.

[Sobbing continues] Chris: And the baby.

I've got more than enough.

Lani: No, Chris.

♪ Eddie: It's amazing how many works we actually produced in a very short period of time.

It's a really satisfying feeling to be back here and to see how Visual Communications has grown and developed over the years, and I don't think we had any idea that it would last this long.

And it's really a testament to the people who have worked here all these different years to keep the idea alive, find the funding for it, and actually at some sacrifice for their own professional lives.

I mean, it's a calling.

It's not just a job.

Visual Communications comes from the idea that a filmmaker is not--or an artist is not separate from the community.

We are all kind of like working together in the service of social change.

And so, you know, we knew we had a specialized role, we had different skills, but that it wasn't any different than anybody else, you know, who was, like, doing organizing or writing or anything.

So we always felt that we were a part of something bigger.

I think the richest stories come from everyday people's lives.

You know, they're really taken for granted and they're always seen as, you know, stories that aren't worthy of being told.

But that's where people live.

You know, I think there's a richness here that I think people will rediscover over and over again.

Jacqueline: One of the things that was so important about the EthnoCommunications program is that it was intended to speak to multiple communities.

It's an incredible lesson in how so-called affirmative action can have multigenerational impact, that there were people at UCLA who struggled to open up a space for students of color to come and learn all kinds of things.

And having that cauldron of ideas and debate and thinking about the relation of Blackness to other racialized identities, I think that makes what happened there really specific and unique.

Leronn: Rebellion, riot, revolt.

You have all these names for people who are tired of a circumstance, and to say rebellion means that there's an existing structure-- political structure, cultural structure--that is not doing service to your reality.

And so the rebellion, to say rebellion means that you--there's a community that does not want to be erased.

There's a community that wants their voice included within the voice of what America is.

And so to say rebellion, I think, is apt because people have a right to their voice being heard.

And if it's not being heard by mainstream media or film, then rebellion makes sense in the very fabric of the nation, actually.

Jacqueline: The legacy of the L.A.

Rebellion filmmakers is growing.

So it's taken longer-- just like the distribution has kind of taken a longer time.

It's taken longer, but I do think that you can see in the work of Ava DuVernay, in the work of Barry Jenkins the kind of attentiveness to Black humanity and the care that is taken to show stories of black intimacy and family dynamics in such a close and careful way.

Leronn: You had to have seen it in order to recognize that you can inhabit it and be it.

But it's definitely a political stance to say that "I'm going to create a world that most of America has never seen, and that world is my everyday life."

Reem: I'm actioning, just do it.

[Indistinct conversations] Man: OK, Great job, everyone.

That's an official wrap on the USA unit for "Don't Be Long."

Congratulations.

[Applause] Reem: Thank you.

Thanks, everyone!

Person: Whoo-hoo!

Moctesuma: Why is it that in 50 years, I'm still singular?

The film schools are incredibly expensive, and they haven't been admitting our students.

And not everybody can organize a sit in to force a school to take you as a student.

♪ So what we did 53 years ago has to be reinvented today.

Reem: I want to bring to life this time of stories that were passed on to me physically by my grandmother and my grandfather.

I am one of 6 million or 7 million members of the Palestinian diaspora, who dream of moving back and who dream of supporting the liberation of Palestine one way or another.

It wasn't a land without people.

We had issues, too.

We weren't a perfect place.

We deserve to explore that, too.

♪ Eddie: You know, every generation has to be inspired in a new way.

And we were inspired by Third World revolutions-- freedom in African colonies, freedom for Cuba, the rise of Vietnam against U.S. imperialism, you know, the emergence of China.

Those are all, like, things we read about, were inspired by.

Larry: You just have to start, you know, and figure it out as you go.

I got involved in voter registration because I didn't vote.

You know, So I said, "Hey, this is not going to happen again."

♪ Reem: The narrative of our stories centers around our collective liberation.

There are stories of escaping death and avoiding poverty and surviving as refugees around the world.

So to hear these stories, it's a gift.

It represents another time where our existence wasn't at risk, where we didn't have to justify our existence to the world.

We were just being.

♪ Luis: The necessity to keep the divisions amongst the vast majority of people is not unintended.

It is a tactic.

It is a strategy.

It is a way and means of maintaining that control system.

♪ So you've got to find a way to bridge those differences.

I think that that's what we represented with EthnoCommunications, mothermuccers.

We represented that cohesion, that sense of unity as we recognized each other as fellow human beings.

Ben: The major thing that I have to say to this next generation is we're all one people who went through a prism that has all the radiance, so don't let all the radiances fight each other.

Stormé: I just want young people to just, whatever you do, just do it well.

That's all I ask.

Do it well.

Do good work.

Ben: So I like doing this because we were wanting to give a handshake to the future, just to say, Let's do this.

Luis: Hermano.

Ben: [Indistinct] Luis: OK. Ha ha!

Ben: Yes, my man.

[Both speaking Spanish] [Luis laughs] Luis: Get the tequila out, man.

[Chuckles] ♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropy; the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture; the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs; and the National Endowment for the Arts.