On March 11, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s 'A Raisin in the Sun' opened on Broadway and changed the face of American theater forever. As the first-ever black woman to author a play performed on Broadway, she did not shy away from richly drawn characters and unprecedented subject matter. The play attracted record crowds and earned the coveted top prize from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. While the play is seen as a groundbreaking work of art, the timely story of Hansberry’s life is far less known.
On March 11, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s 'A Raisin in the Sun' opened on Broadway and changed the face of American theater forever. As the first-ever black woman to author a play performed on Broadway, she did not shy away from richly drawn characters and unprecedented subject matter. The play attracted record crowds and earned the coveted top prize from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. While the play is seen as a groundbreaking work of art, the timely story of Hansberry’s life is far less known.
2017-10-14
6.2
Artist. Activist. Rebel. Visionary.
Zora Neale Hurston, path-breaking novelist, pioneering anthropologist and one of the first black women to enter the American literary canon (Their Eyes Were Watching God), established the African American vernacular as one of the most vital, inventive voices in American literature. This definitive film biography, eighteen years in the making, portrays Zora in all her complexity: gifted, flamboyant, and controversial but always fiercely original.
In 1978, two rival groups at Camp Nightwing must band together to solve a terrifying mystery when horrors from their towns' history come alive.
Twenty-five years after a streak of brutal murders shocked the quiet town of Woodsboro, a new killer has donned the Ghostface mask and begins targeting a group of teenagers to resurrect secrets from the town’s deadly past.
Jake Kimble, the sole survivor of the Chicago massacre, is killed while in solitary confinement. His doctor begins investigating the claims he made about a long-haired woman in white, as a mysterious Japanese woman arrives at his old apartment building to help them get rid of the curse.
Complete strangers stranded at a remote desert motel during a raging storm soon find themselves the target of a deranged murderer. As their numbers thin out, the travelers begin to turn on each other, as each tries to figure out who the killer is.
Ex-UFC fighter Dalton takes a job as a bouncer at a Florida Keys roadhouse, only to discover that this paradise is not all it seems.
After her mother's mysterious death, Nica begins to suspect that the talking, red-haired doll her visiting niece has been playing with may be the key to the mounting bloodshed and chaos.
Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, Moonrise Kingdom tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore – and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle.
Desperate to help her ailing brother, a young woman agrees to compete in a deadly game of "Would You Rather" hosted by a sadistic aristocrat.
Through the course of several accidents and chance encounters, Hanoch and Ruben will meet and each of them will have to face a page of his personal history, a page that they both need to turn for good.
Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween Night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.
Check out the hilarious story of luck and misadventures of Tino, a family man whose life is transformed after he wins the lottery. Dazzled by wealth, this boaster spends all his money on a life of luxury and ostentation. But after finding out that he is bankrupt, he faces comical situations: besides not telling his wife he is broke because she is pregnant and cannot get upset, Tino must accept help from his neighbor who is an extremely thrifty financial adviser and the only one capable of getting him out of the rut.
Following a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, a group of mercenaries take the ultimate gamble: venturing into the quarantine zone to pull off the greatest heist ever attempted.
When a big-city family moves to a remote town, two young brothers and their new friends try to solve the menacing mystery that haunts their home.
Supervillains Harley Quinn, Bloodsport, Peacemaker and a collection of nutty cons at Belle Reve prison join the super-secret, super-shady Task Force X as they are dropped off at the remote, enemy-infused island of Corto Maltese.
A passenger on a cruise ship develops an irresistible infatuation with an eccentric paraplegic's wife.
Survivalist Burt Gummer returns home to Perfection, to find that the little town has been shaken up again by morphing, man-eating Graboids.
While spending the summer at her grandmother's farm, a girl discovers a talent for communicating with horses and tries to tame a fierce stallion.
Lara Jean and Peter have just taken their romance from pretend to officially real when another recipient of one of her love letters enters the picture.
Earl Bassett's celebrity after defeating the Graboid attack against the town of Perfection has proved short-lived, until he's recruited by a Mexican oil company whose workers have found more than they bargained for under the soil.
An in-depth look at the culture of Los Angeles in the ten years leading up to the 1992 uprising that erupted after the verdict of police officers cleared of beating Rodney King.
A documentary on the late American entertainer Dean Reed, who became a huge star in East Germany after settling there in 1973.
Pikilina is a Dominican-born woman of Haitian descent. Racial and political violence erupts when the country of her birth, the Dominican Republic, reverses birthright citizenship and she and 200,000 others are left stateless.
Mary Lou Breslin, co-founder of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, winner of the San Francisco Foundation 2009 Community Leadership awards (the Robert C. Kirkwood Award) - for making a mark in defining disability rights as a civil rights issue. She is a trailblazer whose grassroots movement has had tremendous impact addressing human rights abuses and neglect worldwide. As co-founder of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Mary Lou was at the forefront of creating the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the Fair Housing Amendments Act, and the Civil Rights Restoration Act leading to protected rights and enhanced opportunities for us all, not just those with disabilities.
Her rise was a global phenomenon. Her downfall was a cruel national sport. People close to Britney Spears and lawyers tied to her conservatorship now reassess her career as she battles her father in court over who should control her life.
The Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the May events in France, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Prague Spring, the Chicago riots, the Mexico Summer Olympics, the presidential election of Richard Nixon, the Apollo 8 space mission, the hippies and the Yippies, Bullitt and the living dead. Once upon a time the year 1968.
An archival documentary about the U.S. military’s response to the political and racial injustices of the late 1960s: take a military base, build a mock inner-city set, cast soldiers to play rioters, burn the place down, and film it all.
In World War II. African-American GIs liberate Germany from Nazi rule while racism prevailed in their own army and home country. Returning home they continue fighting for their own rights in the civil rights movement.
Through a training trip, in which the filmmakers also participate, the contrasts that exist between the conservatism of machismo and the new masculinity are evident; testimonies, discoveries and liberation in a circle of men.
French documentary campaigning for the liberalization of abortion and contraception, directed by Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel in 1973.
Steal This Film focuses on Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, prominent members of the Swedish filesharing community. The makers claimed that 'Old Media' documentary crews couldn't understand the internet culture that filesharers took part in, and that they saw peer-to-peer organization as a threat to their livelihoods. Because of that, they were determined to accurately represent the filesharing community from within. Notably, Steal This Film was released and distributed, free of charge, through the same filesharing networks that the film documents.
THE BLACK LIST: VOL. 2 profiles some of today's most fascinating African-Americans. From the childhood inspirations that shaped their ambitions, to the evolving American landscape they helped define, to the importance of preserving a unique cultural identity for future generations, these prominent individuals offer a unique look into the zeitgeist of black America, redefining the traditional pejorative notion of a blacklist.
Spies of Mississippi tells the story of a secret spy agency formed by the state of Mississippi to preserve segregation and maintain white supremacy. The anti-civil rights organization was hidden in plain sight in an unassuming office in the Mississippi State Capitol. Funded with taxpayer dollars and granted extraordinary latitude to carry out its mission, the Commission evolved from a propaganda machine into a full blown spy operation. How do we know this is true? The Commission itself tells us in more than 146,000 pages of files preserved by the State. This wealth of first person primary historical material guides us through one of the most fascinating and yet little known stories of America's quest for Civil Rights.
A documentary on the road that tracks the journey by Georgina, an elderly transgender woman forced to cross the sandy peninsula Guajira, on foot, to obtain the thing she has desired for almost half a century: a document that will hand her the right to be what she has always felt she was, and will allow her, at long last, to vote.
The moment where American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved hands in defiance on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics is one of the most memorable images in sports history. But there is a third man in the photo, the white Australian who finished second to Smith and ahead of Carlos in the 200 meters. His name is Peter Norman, and he stands in quiet solidarity with them. Norman’s story is retold in this film with passion and perspective.
An examination of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s in the UK, surveying both the individuals and the cultural forces that defined the era. At the heart of the documentary is a series of astonishing interviews with past activists, many of whom are speaking for the first time about what it was really like to be involved in the British Black Power movement, bringing to life one of the key cultural revolutions in the history of the nation.
Gloria Allred overcame trauma and personal setbacks to become one of the nation’s most famous women’s rights attorneys. Now the feminist firebrand takes on two of the biggest adversaries of her career, Bill Cosby and Donald Trump, as sexual violence allegations grip the nation and keep her in the spotlight.
The story of the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans and the loss of civil rights.
From his Memphis studio, Ernest Withers’ nearly 2 million images were a treasured record of Black history but his legacy was complicated by decades of secret FBI service revealed only after his death. Was he a friend of the civil rights community, or enemy—or both?