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Razing Liberty Square 2023
Eight miles inland of Miami’s beaches, Liberty City residents fight to save their community from climate gentrification: their land, sitting on a ridge, becomes real estate gold.
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Storming Caesars Palace 2022
This inspiring documentary chronicles the extraordinary life of Ruby Duncan, an activist who fights the welfare system and becomes a White House advisor.
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The First Monument 2022
Until 2021, there was not a single official monument erected for the legendary Black Panther Party. This finally changed when Fredrika Newton, the widow of former Minister of Defense Huey Newton, worked with the city of Oakland to commission a bust of Mr. Newton that now stands on the block where he was killed. Following sculptor Dana King from conceptualization through the unveiling ceremony over a year-long period, The First Monument offers an exclusive look at the process and significance of this groundbreaking memorial for an iconic Black movement.
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Hazing 2022
Explores a variety of underground hazing rituals that are abusive and sometimes deadly. The journey to understand hazing culture reveals a world of toxic masculinity, violence, humiliation, binge drinking, denial, and institutional coverups.
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Silent Beauty 2022    star_border 2
When director Jasmin Mara López sees a photo of her niece with her grandfather, she is flooded by painful memories of her own childhood sexual abuse at his hands—and the following 24 years of her silence. In this cinematically striking and poetic documentary, López bravely films her story as a willful act to accept difficult truths while finding beauty in the process of healing. As she defies the cultural silence that pervades her family and confronts her abusive grandfather, who is a Baptist minister, a world of generational abuse unfolds, and she quickly discovers she is not alone. Through archival family footage and intimate moments with her family, López has created a film about confronting painful truths and the beauty one can feel when they reach the other side of grief.
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Let the Little Light Shine 2022    star_border 8
When a thriving, top-ranked African American elementary school is threatened to be replaced by a new high school favoring the community’s wealthier residents, parents, students and educators fight for the elementary school’s survival.
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After Sherman 2022
Beautifully layered and expressionistic, After Sherman is a story about inheritance and the tension that defines our collective American history, especially Black history. The filmmaker follows his father, a minister, in the aftermath of a mass shooting at his church in Charleston, South Carolina to understand how communities of descendants of enslaved Africans use their unique faith as a form of survival as they continue to fight for America to live up to its many unfulfilled promises to Black Americans.
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Fannie Lou Hamer’s America 2022
The film explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of a Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist and one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest leaders. Throughout the 1960s, Fannie Lou Hamer established a legacy of civil rights and human rights activism that remains relevant to this day – especially among Black youth.
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Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands 2022
A documentary exploring the life, career, art and legacy of Marian Anderson.
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Ailey 2021    star_border 6
Alvin Ailey was a visionary artist who found salvation through dance. Told in his own words and through the creation of a dance inspired by his life, this immersive portrait follows a man who, when confronted by a world that refused to embrace him, determined to build one that would.
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Through the Night 2021    star_border 8
When one’s sole focus is to provide for their children, the stakes are extremely high. The need for multiple jobs to make ends meet has become a common reality for many families in this country, which leads to a very important question: who looks after the children while their parents work? Through the Night examines the economic and emotional toll affecting some American families, told through the lens of a 24-hour daycare center in Westchester, New York. At the center of it all is Nunu, the primary caregiver and a hero to many families in need of a safe space to bring their children.
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When Claude Got Shot 2021    star_border 8.5
While visiting his hometown of Milwaukee, father of three and aspiring attorney, Claude Motley, is shot in the face by 15-year-old Nathan, during a carjacking gone wrong. Two nights later, Nathan attempts to rob Victoria, who fires her gun in self-defense, partially paralyzing Nathan from the waist down. Three strangers tragically bound together by a weekend of gun violence on a five-year journey toward recovery and forgiveness.
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Two Gods 2020    star_border 5
The story of a Muslim casket maker and ritual body washer in Newark, NJ who takes two young men under his wing to teach them how to live better lives.
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Belly of the Beast 2020    star_border 7.5
When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal involuntary sterilizations in California’s women’s prison system, they take to the courtroom to wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. With a growing team of investigators inside prison working with colleagues on the outside, they uncover a series of statewide crimes - from dangerously inadequate health care to sexual assault to coercive sterilizations - primarily targeting women of color. But no one believes them. This shocking legal drama captured over seven years features extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated women, demanding our attention to a shameful and ongoing legacy of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States.
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And She Could Be Next 2020
The story of a defiant movement of women of color transforming American politics from the ground up. Filmed during the historic 2018 midterm elections, the series follows organizers and candidates as they fight on behalf of black, brown, immigrant and poor communities–long neglected by politicians and pundits alike.
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The First Rainbow Coalition 2019    star_border 7.5
Chicago 1969: Activists from the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots united African Americans, Latinos, and poor whites to confront police brutality and unfair housing practices in one of America’s most segregated cities. A timely story of collective action, The First Rainbow Coalition tells this little-known chronicle of political struggle with insight and urgency using archival footage and interviews with those who lived it.
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Highway Mike 2019
Highway Mike is the story of Mike, a formerly homeless addict who used to live below the bridge in a park where hundreds of users gather every day to do drugs. Now he does outreach work to prevent overdoses in that same park. Mike tries to balance his past with his present as he leads us into the underbelly of one of New York City’s most overlooked communities, and gives us a firsthand glimpse of what the opioid crisis looks like in urban spaces.
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Always in Season 2019    star_border 6.8
When 17-year-old Lennon Lacy is found hanging from a swing set in rural North Carolina in 2014, his mother's search for justice and reconciliation begins while the trauma of more than a century of lynching African Americans bleeds into the present.
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All Skinfolk Ain't Kinfolk 2018
After a contentious race last fall, the runoff for mayor of New Orleans came down to two candidates: Desirée Charbonnet and LaToya Cantrell, two very different black women. The winner of this election would take office as the first female mayor of New Orleans and the city's fourth black mayor. Through news footage, campaign advertisements and archival audio and video, All Skinfolk Ain't Kinfolk is the unprecedented story of this mayoral runoff told through the eyes of black women living in this city.
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Mr. SOUL! 2018    star_border 7
On the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, one fearless black pioneer reconceived a Harlem Renaissance for a new era, ushering giants and rising stars of black American culture onto the national television stage. He was hip. He was smart. He was innovative, political, and gay. In his personal fight for social equality, this man ensured the Revolution would be televised. The man was Ellis Haizlip. The Revolution was soul!
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