FILMS & TV
Our cinema and TV has historically minimised and tokenised the Black experience and the experience of those of colour.
These collected films and TV programmes showcase their talent in front and behind the camera, and the stories they want to tell.
A Raisin In The Sun
A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a black woman to be on Broadway and is now an immortal part of the theatrical canon. The original stars—including Sidney Poitier (In the Heat of the Night) and Ruby Dee (Do the Right Thing)—reprise their roles as members of an African American family living in a cramped Chicago apartment. In his deeply resonant, film, Daniel Petrie captures the high stakes, shifting currents, and varieties of experience within black life in mid-century America.
The Black Power Mixtape
From 1967 to 1975, fueled by curiosity and naïveté, Swedish journalists traversed the ocean to film the black power movement in America. The Black Power Mixtape mobilises a mosaic of images, music, and narration to chronicle the movement’s evolution.
Black Is The New Black
A selection of exceptional figures drawn from the world of politics, business, culture, religion and science face the camera and share their experiences of being black and British.
Beautifully shot by artist and director Simon Frederick, the line-up of influential individuals reveal their heartfelt stories and unfiltered opinions to paint a unique portrait of modern Britain’s past, present and future.
Dear White People
Adapted from the hit film, this Netflix series show students of colour navigating the daily slights and slipper politics of life at an Ivy League college that’s not nearly as “post-racial” as it thinks it is.
Detroit
Kathryn Bigelow’s gut-wrenching – and essential – dramatisation of a tragic chapter from America's past that draws distressing parallels to the present, set during the 1967 Detroit riots in which a group of rogue police officers respond to a complaint with retribution rather than justice on their minds.
Do The Right Thing
This 1989 masterpiece by Spike Lee confirmed him as a writer and filmmaker of peerless vision and passionate social engagement. Over the course of a single day, the easygoing interactions of a cast of unforgettable characters give way to heated confrontations as tensions rise along racial fault lines, ultimately exploding into violence. Do the Right Thing is a landmark in American cinema, as politically and emotionally charged and as relevant now as when it first hit the big screen.
Get Out
Jordan Peele’s smart and frightening thriller satirises whiteness and cultural appropriation in this cultural phenomenon where a young African-American visits his white girlfriend's parents for the weekend.
Hala
Seventeen-year-old Pakistani American teenager Hala (Geraldine Viswanathan) struggles to balance desire with her familial, cultural and religious obligations. As she comes into her own, she grapples with a secret that threatens to unravel her family. Written and directed by Minhal Baig and executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, “Hala” was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
I Am Not Your Negro
Based on iconic writer James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House, this film explores the history of racism in the United States through Baldwin's reminiscences of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as his personal observations of American history.
Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson,
LA 92
Over twenty-five years after the verdict in the Rodney King trial sparked several days of protests and violence in Los Angeles, LA 92 immerses viewers in that tumultuous period through stunning and rarely-seen footage.
The film brings a fresh perspective to a pivotal moment and to what we are seeing in the world today.
Little America
Little America is “an anthology of funny, romantic, heartfelt, inspiring, and surprising stories about the lives of immigrants in the United States.
Malcolm X
Spike Lee’s 1992 vivid biographical epic stars Denzel Washington as the controversial and influential Black Nationalist leader, from his early life and career as a small-time gangster, to his ministry as a member of the Nation of Islam.
My Beautiful Laundrette
Working from a richly layered script by Hanif Kureishi, who was soon to be an internationally renowned writer, Stephen Frears tells an uncommon love story that takes place between a young South London Pakistani man (Gordon Warnecke), who decides to open an upscale laundromat to make his family proud, and his childhood friend, a skinhead (Daniel Day-Lewis, in a breakthrough role) who volunteers to help make his dream a reality. This culture-clash comedy is also a subversive work of social realism that dares to address racism, homophobia, and sociopolitical marginalization in Margaret Thatcher’s England.
Paris Is Burning
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. Made over seven years, Paris Is Burning offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion “houses,” from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women—including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza—Paris Is Burning brings it, celebrating the joy of movement, the force of eloquence, and the draw of community.
Pose
Set in the 1980s and early 1990’s, Pose explores the juxtaposition of several segments of life and society in New York: the ball culture world, the rise of the luxury Trump-era universe and the downtown social and literary scene.
Charged with energy, poise, and confidence, Pose pirouettes between artistic opulence and deliciously soapy drama.
Roots
A 1977 TV dramatization of author Alex Haley's family line from ancestor Kunta Kinte's enslavement to his descendants' liberation.
Schindler’s List
Steven Spielberg’s searing account of the Holocaust follows Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. Unflinching and almost unbearably powerful, Schindlers List remains an essential recounting of one history’s darkest moments.
Selma
Ava Duvernay’s poweful, moving chronicle of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s campaign to secure equal voting rights via an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965.
SHOAH
Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.
The 13th
In Ava DuVernay’s thought-provoking, Oscar-nominated documentary, scholars, activists and politicians analyse the criminalisation of African-Americans and the U.S prison boom.
The Life and Death of Martha P. Johnson
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.
When They See Us
Ava DuVernay’s harrowing account of the Central Park Five.
Five teens from Harlem become trapped in a nightmare when they’re falsely accused of a brutal attack in Central Park.
Based on a true story.
WOKE
Inspired by the life and work of artist Keith Knight, comedy series WOKE takes an absurdly irreverent look at identity and culture as it follows Keef, an African-American cartoonist finally on the verge of mainstream success when an unexpected incident changes everything. With a fresh outlook on the world around him, Keef must now navigate the new voices and ideas that confront and challenge him, all without setting aflame everything he’s already built.