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Arts & Culture

…I Told You So
Alan Kondo
Producer: Visual Communications
1973, 18 min., BW, US
"All this identity thing. What is it you're looking for?" asks the elderly aunt of leading Japanese American poet, Lawson Inada. Through this intimate portrait, we explore Inada's answer to this compl...

Adventures in Assimilation
Richard Dean Moss
1992, 8 min., Color, US
In this engaging performance video, Moss experiments with his own choreography and dance, using movement within a fixed frame to express self-discovery and the aesthetics of identity....

All the Ladies Say
Ana Garcia
Producer: Ana "Rokafella" Garcia
2010, 45 min., Color, US
Veteran b-girl Ana "Rokafella" Garcia's first documentary film ALL THE LADIES SAY features the work of female breakdancers in the United States, including Aiko, Baby Love, Beta, Lady Champ, Severe and...

Anomaly: A Documentary Film about Multiracial Identity
Jessica Chen Drammeh
Producer: Jessica Chen Drammeh & Sharon K. Smith
2013, 47 min., Color, US
ANOMALY is an award-winning documentary film that provides a thought-provoking look at multiracial identity by combining personal narratives with the larger drama of mixed race in American culture. Th...

Arctic Hip Hop
Randy Kelly
Producer: Jacques Ménard & Micheline Shoebridge
2007, 44 min., Color, Canada
In Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, an isolated community of 1500 mainly Inuit residents, Hip-Hop has been popular for many years. But it’s the glamourized gangsta lifestyle on display in music videos that man...

Art for Social Change
Mary Wells
2007, 33 min., Color, Jamaica
Jamaican filmmaker Mary Wells made ART FOR SOCIAL CHANGE, a perceptive half-hour film, in response to the launch of Frances-Anne Solomon’s heart-wrenching movie A Winter Tale when it opened in cinemas...

The Art of Love and Struggle
Jessica Habie
2006, 78 min., Color, US
In this film, artists, singers, emcees, activists, poets and writers come together in an explosive exploration of feminine creation. Each lady brings to the screen her innermost struggles in an attemp...

Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992
Dagmar Schultz
2012, 79 min., Color, Germany
2012 marks the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s passing, the acclaimed Black lesbian feminist poet and activist. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Lorde’s incisive writings and speeches defined and inspir...

Black Body
Thomas Allen Harris
1992, 7 min., Color, US
Thomas Allen Harris uses text, special effects, and a single bound male nude to emphasize the humanity underlying the multiple definitions of black identity and subjectivity. The audience may be asked...

Blaze: The Truth Through Hip Hop
Maurice Lynch
2006, 90 min., Color, US
The Hip-Hop Christian movement has been uplifting youth by delivering positive religious messages that are not about drugs, sex, or hate but of hope and peace. In a society where artists are glorif...

Body and Soul (De Corpo e Alma)
Matthieu Bron
2011, 54 min., Color, Mozambique
Victoria, Mariana and Vasco are three young Mozambicans with physical disabilities living in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city. The film explores how they see themselves, raising questions about self-...

Border Brujo
Isaac Artenstein
Producer: Cinewest
1989, 60 min., Color, US
Border Brujo is a ritual-linguistic journey across the U.S./Mexico border written and performed by artist Guillermo Gómez Peña. In the guise of a cross-cultural shaman, Gómez Peña shifts into 15 diff...

Call For Change Series 2005
Various
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2005, 133 min., Color, US
A series of 16 shorts on how NYC communities of color view their "State of America" and what they're doing to make changes. These shorts aim to provoke discussion and more. Topics range from the cont...

Calypso @ Dirty Jim's
Pascale Obolo
2005, 85 min., Color, Trinidad & Tobago
Featuring the last of the great calypsonians, bringing them all together to sing such classics as “Rum & Coca Cola,” “Jean and Dinah,” and “Shame and Scandal in the Family,” to name a few, the film pr...

Calypso Dreams
Geoffrey Dunn and Michael Horne
2004, 85 min., Color, Trinidad & Tobago
An intimate portrait of some of the true calypsonians in Trinidad & Tobago, in performance and in conversation. Shot over three years in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the documentary includes such legendar...

The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash
Yvonne Welbon
1992, 26 min., Color, US
This is an in-depth interview with filmmaker Julie Dash, whose first feature film, DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, has become a critical and word-of-mouth sensation since its release in the Winter of 1992. Her...

Claiming Our Voice
Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel
Producer: Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel & Chitra Aiyar
2013, 21 min., US
CLAIMING OUR VOICE follows members of Andolan, a Queens-based organization founded and led by South Asian domestic workers as a means to support each other and collectively organize against exploitati...

Conakry Kas: The Conakry People
Manthia Diawara
2003, 82 min., Color, US
In January 2003, Director Manthia Diawara visited Guinea-Conakry to see what was left of the artists (Ballets Africains, Bembeya Jazz National) and intellectuals (D.T. Niane, Telivel Diallo) of the Gu...

The Couple in the Cage
Coco Fusco & Paula Heredia
1993, 30 min., Color, US
Over the last five hundred years, non-western human beings have been exhibited in the taverns, theaters, gardens, museums, zoos, circuses and world's fairs of Europe, and the circuses and freak shows ...

Creative Detours
Bridgett Davis
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
1992, 10 min., Color, US
In this short narrative, a young woman moves to New York City from the Midwest in order to "develop her writing" and to share an apartment with her boyfriend. Distracted from her new creative life-sty...

Cruisin' J-town
Duane Kubo
Producer: Visual Communications
1974, 24 min., Color, US
This is the story of the formation of the popular jazz fusion band, Hiroshima, in the late 70s. The musicians reflect on their culture, musical influences, and the political movements of the 1960's ou...

Deft Changes: An Improvised Experience
Alonzo Speight
1991, 10 min., Color, US
Through short improvised sketches, this video explores the generational conflicts between a father and son who are each musicians. It features performances by guitarist Mark Whittfield, and the late m...

Democracy in Dakar
Ben Herson, Magee McIlvaine & Chris Moore
Producer: Nomadic Wax and Sol Productions
2007, 66 min., Color, US/Senegal
"Democracy in Dakar" explores the transformative role of Hip-Hop in politics in Senegal, West Africa during the 2007 presidential election campaign. This documentary mixes interviews, freestyles, and ...

Devotion
Barbara Hammer
2000, 85 min., Color, Japan/US
DEVOTION investigates the extremely complex and hierarchical relationships among a loyal group of filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years making films for one man--Ogawa Shinsuke. These heartbreaking ...

Diamonds in the Rough: A Ugandan Hip Hop Revolution
Brett Mazurek
2009, 53 min., US/Uganda
From the ashes of four decades of war, AIDS and corruption in Uganda, The Bataka Squad artists, Babaluku and Saba Saba, rise to forge a revolutionary path using music. They are on a mission to empower...

Dreams Inside and Out
Sylvie Thouard
1990, 52 min., Color, US
The Family, a repertory theater company composed of former inmates and actors, and born in the aftermath of the 1971 Attica uprising, is well-known for Miguel Piñero's play SHORT EYES, winner of the B...

Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation
Manthia Diawara
2010, 50 min., Color, US
In 2009, filmmaker Manthia Diawara, along with his camera, documented his conversations with Martinican philosopher, writer, and poet Édouard Glissant aboard the Queen Mary II on their transatlantic j...

Encounter at the Intergalactic Café
Thomas Allen Harris
1996, 17 min., Color, US
A videotape of a live performance--a mythopoetic rendering of the original encounters between African, Indigenous and European peoples in the present day "border regions". Saint, comic, demon, deity, ...

A Family Called Abrew
Maureen Blackwood
Producer: Sankofa Film and Video Collective
1992, 42 min., Color, UK
This documentary profiles a fascinating family that has been based in Scotland since the end of the 19th century. It also traces the history of people of African descent living in Europe before the gr...

Follow Your Heart: China's New Youth Movement
Duncan Jepson
2007, 89 min., Color, China
A revealing documentary on the work and life of successful and independent Chinese Hip-Hop artists and their cultural influence in a society rapidly changing from communism to consumerism. Clashing wi...

Four Women
Julie Dash
1979, 7 min., Color, US
An imaginatively choreographed dance interpretation of the ballad by Nina Simone on four common stereotypes of Black women....

Fragments of Barbara McCullough
Barbara McCullough
1980, 10 min., Color, US
This work is a montage of magic centered imagery. It contains some of the footage from Shopping Bag Spirits plus new material....

Frontier Life
Hans Fjellestad
Producer: Ryan Page
2003, 92 min., Color, US/Mexico
A feature-length documentary that explores beyond Tijuana s sin-city heritage and searches for the heart and identity of a city that is much more than a cantina-strewn throwback to the Old West. It a...

Garbage a.k.a. Garbage Demonstration (Newsreel #5)
Newsreel
Producer: Newsreel
1968, 10 min., BW, US
During a prolonged garbage collector's strike in New York City, a group of youths from the Lower East Side of Manhattan decide to use the situation to make a political statement. They collect garbage...

Graffiti Verite' 1: Read the Writing on the Wall
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 45 min., Color, US
An award-winning documentary that explores the eclectic world of Hip-Hop and the urban graffiti artist. GRAFFITI VERITE’ is the first up-close and personal expose’ into the graffiti art world as exper...

Graffiti Verite' 10: Hip-Hop Dance: Moving in the Moment
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2010, 75 min., Color, US
Whether you call it breakin’, bboyin’, bgirlin’ or simply Hip-Hop dance, what we witness here is authentically funky and soulful. These dancers strive to be “in the moment.” When it’s good, what’s exp...

Graffiti Verite' 11: Don't Believe Da Noize!: Voices from Da Hip-Hop Undaground
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2010, 55 min., Color, US
This documentary is an exploration of the creative expressions in contemporary American Hip-Hop. It focuses on the innovation, movement, and the raw and unfiltered personalized “truth” of some of the...

Graffiti Verite' 2: Freedom of Expression?
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 57 min., Color, US
Flying high above Los Angeles, GV2 looks down on the streets, introducing us to the artists who “tag” the walls of our cities with spraycans while we sleep. GV2 features 19 graffiti artists and rev...

Graffiti Verite' 3: A Voyage Into the Iconography of Graffiti Art
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 54 min., Color, US
This experimental documentary probes the socio-political context that distracts the average person from appreciating the significance of graffiti’s historical and artistic impact. In GV3, Bryan for...

Graffiti Verite' 4: Basic Techniques for Creating Graffiti Art on Walls & Canvas
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 68 min., Color, US
This documentary is the ultimate step-by-step program on spray can art. Outsiders get a rare glimpse into the outstanding art and eclectic personalities behind the controversial graffiti art movement...

Graffiti Verite' 5: The Sacred Elements of Hip-Hop
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 42 min., Color, US
GV5 is a portrait of the educational value and therapeutic aspect of the four elements of contemporary Hip-Hop: DJing, break-dancing, rappin’ and graffiti art. “Hip-Hop, if used creatively, can giv...

Graffiti Verite' 6: The Odyssey: Poets, Passion & Poetry
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2006, 78 min., Color, US
GV6 features 31 multi-ethnic, award-winning, published and highly respected poets. Their creations are a seamlessly woven, uniquely honest, visual tapestry that synthesizes one-on-one poetry readings,...

Graffiti Verite' 7: Random Urban Static: … Spoken Word
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2008, 120 min., Color, US
GV7 probes the reality of spoken word poets, or, poets that write for the stage. Spoke Word poetry, often flavored with Hip-Hop, connects with today’s youth because the poetics of this art form speak ...

Graffiti Verite' 8: The Fifth Element: The Art of the Beat-Boxer
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2010, 45 min., Color, US
Combining throat-based effects that create a “wall of sound,” the job of the human beat-boxer is to compose a flawless soundscape. GV8 explores the history of beat-boxing and its claim as its own ...

Graffiti Verite' 9: Soulful Ways: The DJ
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2010, 45 min., Color, US
Watching a great DJ spin is analogous to watching a professional musician perform. As composer and producer Glenn Towery says, “DJs have to understand the dynamics of music to understand the beat”. ...

Herstory (Newsreel #61)
Newsreel
9 min., BW, US
Through the use of a cranky, songs, rhythm, music and narration, the San Francisco Women's Street Theatre gives a short history of women's struggles from prehistory to the early 1970s....

Hinkson
Christopher Laird
2013, 97 min., Color, Trinidad & Tobago
Trinidadian Donald ‘Jackie’ Hinkson, in his 70th year and on the occasion of a massive retrospective in four exhibition spaces talks about his life’s work and demonstrates his techniques in expressing...

Hip Hop Sp
Francisco Cesar
1990, 11 min., Color
Young Black members of Sao Paulo's hip hop movement depict their experience and views of Black Brazilian history through their music, dance and graffiti....

Hiphopistan: Representing Locality in a Global City
Çiğdem Akbay
2007, 25 min., Color, Turkey
HIPHOPISTAN is a documentary film that examines the impact of Hip-Hop culture on Istanbul youth and reveals how young Turkish rappers, DJs, break-dancers, and graffiti artists creatively blend popular...

Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story
Maria Binder
1997, 28 min., Color, Germany
A moving documentary about the life and untimely death of Ghanaian-German poet, academic and political personality May Ayim. Ayim was one of the founders of the Black German Movement, and her research...

I Love Hip Hop in Morocco
Joshua Asen & Jennifer Needleman
Producer: Rizz Productions, Inc.
2007, 80 min., Color, US/Morocco
This feature-length documentary follows the creation of Morocco's first-ever Hip-Hop festival, from inception all the way to the stage. Along the way we meet DJ Key, a self-taught turntable prodigy wh...

Illusions
Julie Dash
1983, 34 min., BW, US
Set in a fictitious Hollywood studio in 1942, this elegant drama contrasts society's views of Black women with their self-perceptions. An ambitious movie executive, Mignon Dupree is perceived by her ...

The Insatiable Season
Mariel Brown
2007, 52 min., Color, Trinidad & Tobago
It’s January 2006 and Brian Mac Farlane’s carnival workshop is quiet and practically empty – littered with left-over costumes and a couple of hangers-on from last year’s carnival. The atmosphere begin...

Inside Out in the Open
Alan Roth
2001, 60 min., Color, US
INSIDE OUT IN THE OPEN focuses on the revolutionary, avant-garde developments in Jazz that evolved in the early 1960's, expanding the boundaries in rhythm, sound, harmonics, and collective improvisati...

Is It Sweet? Tales of an African Superstar in New York
Jesse W Shipley
Color, US
Reggie Rockstone is a celebrity rap musician in Accra, Ghana, where he inspired a young generation of musicians and continues to draw huge crowds. But when he comes to New York to play for the Ghanaia...

Know Your Enemy
Art Jones
1990, 27 min., Color, US
Using the controversy surrounding the rap group Public Enemy, KNOW YOUR ENEMY critiques the mass media's bias against rap music and culture. Interviews combined with performance footage, and archival ...

Knowledge Reigns Supreme
Art Jones
1991, 8 min., Color, US
Using the words and music of rapper KRS-1, this video short questions the current wave of multiculturalism in the educational system. It interrogates the myths of societal homogeneity, and assumed cul...

L’Esprit Prêt-à-Partager
Jamika Ajalon
2009, 28 min., Color, Germany/Senegal
Documents an art workshop held in Dakar, Senegal, in 2008, where artists from Africa and Europe explore issues surrounding fashion, sport and diasporic art and identities. The artists collaborate with...

La Bruja: A Witch from the Bronx
Felix Rodriguez
2005, 50 min., Color, US
Art, labor and family blend in this intimate documentary about performance artist Caridad De La Luz, better known as 'La Bruja'. Born and raised in the Bronx, this daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants ...

Latino Poets Speakout
Renata Gangemi & Ruben Gonzalez
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2005, 10 min., Color, US
Three shorts featuring performances by some of New York City's vanguard Latino poets: KILLKILLKILL by Jesus Papoleto Melendez (5 Min) GOD BLESS AMERICA by Mariposa (2 min), and TAMALES IN JA...

A Litany For Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde (90)
Ada Gay Griffin & Michelle Parkerson
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1996, 90 min., Color, US
An epic portrait of the eloquent, award-winning Black, lesbian, poet, mother, teacher and activist, Audre Lorde, whose writings -- spanning five decades -- articulated some of the most important socia...

A Litany For Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde
Ada Gay Griffin & Michelle Parkerson
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1995, 52 min., Color, US
An epic portrait of the eloquent, award-winning Black, lesbian, poet, mother, teacher and activist, Audre Lorde, whose writings -- spanning five decades -- articulated some of the most important socia...

Maison Tropicale
Manthia Diawara
2008, 58 min., Color, Republic of Congo/France
In 2008, filmmaker Manthia Diawara and artist Angela Ferreira travelled to Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo to “search through the debris left behind by those who took away the [Maison Tropicales]....

Mas Man
Dalton Narine
2010, 56 min., Color, Trinidad/US
Mingling traditional Carnival elements with abstract ideas, Emmy Award winner Peter Minshall goes chic to chic with upper crust art in Trinidad’s annual spring festival. The film captures his flair fo...

Masizakhe: Building Each Other
Angelica Macklin and Scott Macklin
Producer: Open Hand Reel
2008, 80 min., Color, South Africa/US
"Masizakhe, Building Each Other" explores the role of art, social activism and Hip-Hop in education and presents students, teachers, artists and principals working to support each other while re-estab...

Mask: A Field Report on Masked Performance
Liu Xiaojin
2000, 120 min., Color, China
Since the time of the Qing Dynasty, villagers of Xiaotun have performed a folk opera in which all the actors wear masks. Known as the “Guansuo Opera”, its performances were suspended during the Cultu...

Media Assassin
Art Jones
1989, 17 min., Color, US
A politically charged analysis of hip-hop culture that challenges the media portrayal of hip-hop as violent and noisy, rather than as a statement of identity and empowerment....

Mi Otro Yo (My Other Self)
Isaac Artenstein
Producer: Cinewest
1989, 30 min., Color, US
Expanding his exploration of marginalized identity and border culture, videomaker Artenstein's MI OTRO YO looks at the work of Chicano artists living in California. Their cultural ties to Mexico and h...

Mr. Devious
John Fredericks
2006, 73 min., South Africa
MR. DEVIOUS is an exploration of the life and impact of South African Hip-Hop artist Mr. Devious on the youth and community of Cape Flats in Cape Town, South Africa. The film traces Mr. Devious' intro...

Musica
Gustavo Paredes
1985, 59 min., Color, US
This film is an odyssey through the eyes, words and music of individuals who pioneered Afro-Cuban music in the United States. The video offers a rich overview of a wide number of musical styles from ...

Negritude: A Dialogue Between Wole Soyinka and Senghor
Manthia Diawara
2015, 59 min., Color, USA/France/Germany/Portugal
This imagined dialogue between Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the founding fathers of Negritude, and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka was reconstructed almost entirely from archival materials. It probes the...

ocularis: eye surrogates
Tran T. Kim-Trang
1997, 21 min., Color, US
The latest tape in Kim-Trang's eight tape series on metaphorical and physical blindness Ocularis: Eye Surrogates addressing issues of surveillance and technology that allow us to see what we normally ...

One People
Al Santana
Producer: Laura L. Fowler & Al Santana
2007, 30 min., Color, US
Is everything political? Against the backdrop of a gentrified Harlem community, the story centers on two sisters who have opposite views about social responsibility and the role of artists. Aliyah, a ...

An Opera of the World
Manthia Diawara
2018, 70 min., Color
Manthia Diawara’s film is based on the African opera Bintou Were, a Sahel Opera, which recounts an eternal migration drama. The Bintou Were opera, filmed on location in Bamako, in 2007, serves as a mi...

The Other Side of the Water: The Journey of a Haitian Rara Band in Brooklyn
Jeremy Robins and Magali Damas
2010, 52 min., Color/BW, US/Haiti
Part carnival, part vodou ceremony, and part grassroots protest, Haitian “Rara” is one of the most breathtaking and contested forms of music in the Americas. The Other Side of the Water follows a gro...

The Other Side of the Water: The Journey of a Haitian Rara Band in Brooklyn (72)
Jeremy Robins and Magali Damas
2010, 72 min., Color/BW, US/Haiti
Part carnival, part vodou ceremony, and part grassroots protest, Haitian “Rara” is one of the most breathtaking and contested forms of music in the Americas. The Other Side of the Water follows a grou...

Out of La Negrura/Out of Blackness in the Bronx
Jane Gabriels
2018, 24 min., Color, US
Dance artists Sita Frederick, Ana "Rokafella" Garcia, and Marion Ramirez collaborate to create a performance work that explores Caribbean and Latina-American experiences through dance. OUT OF LA NE...

Percussion, Impressions and Reality
Allan Siegel
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1978, 30 min., Color, US
This is the first comprehensive U.S. film to explore the origins and growth of traditional Puerto Rican music. Interviews with musicians living in New York reveal how traditional music is used as a so...

Praise House
Julie Dash
1991, 30 min., Color, US
This video uses stunningly beautiful and innovative techniques to tell the story of a young woman moved to dance by a powerful and creative spirit. Despite her mother's disinterest, Hannah is driven t...

Red Detachment of Women
People's Republic of China
Producer: People's Republic of China
1968, 105 min., Color, China
This film presents the famous ballet from China. It is a blend of traditional Western theatre, Peking opera, folk dance, calisthenics, and acrobatics. It tells the story of a women's military unit dur...

A Refutation of Time
Dan Boord & Greg Durbin & Luis Valdovino
1997, 8 min., Color, US/Argentina
A student from the Large Midwestern Universe receives an unusual e-mail message in the Logic Lab. The communication concerns, the nature of time, tango singer Carlos Gardel, the humorist Will Rodgers,...

Respect is Due
Cyrille Phipps
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
1992, 10 min., Color, US
In keeping with the doctrines of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, sex sells rap music. In this video, Black youth examine the ways women of African descent are frequently portrayed in rap lyrics and mu...

Rock Me, Goong Hay
Shelton Ito
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
1992, 5 min., Color, US
The Goong Hay Kid is the fictional Chinese rapper created and played by Alvin Eng. ROCK ME, GOONG HAY combines hip-hop styling with a forceful protest against stereotypes....

Ruins
Jesse Lerner
1999, 78 min., BW, US
Ancient Maya and Aztec objects have been shown in circuses, art galleries, World's Fairs and natural history museums. This experimental documentary suggests how diplomacy and Pan-Americanism recast a...

Samuel Lind's Coastal World
Sonia Fritz
Producer: Frances Lausell
2006, 24 min., Color, Puerto Rico
This documentary captures the colors, music and culture that inspire the art of Samuel Lind, an Afro-Puerto Rican painter, graphic artist and sculptor. Originally from Loiza, Puerto Rico, Lind celebra...

Sapphire and the Slave Girl
Leah Gilliam
1995, 17 min., BW, US
This film is loosely based on the 1950's British detective film SAPPHIRE, in which two Scotland Yard detectives investigate the murder of a young woman who is passing for white. Referencing everyone f...

Sembene: the Making of African Cinema
Manthia Diawara & Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
1994, 60 min., Color, UK
This rich documentary follows the legendary Senagalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane from the Pan African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso back to the streets of Dakar and his Galle Ceddo home a...

Shaman Llego
Frank Perez
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
1992, 17 min., Color, US
This documentary profiles the "Shaman Repertory Theatre", a community oriented group based in Spanish Harlem. Through sketches from performances and interviews with troupe members, this piece illustra...

She's Beautiful When She's Angry (Newsreel #48)
Newsreel
1969, 17 min., BW, US
This film documents a play given at the March 28th, 1969 abortion rally by some very angry women. A beauty contestant is primed by her mother, her teacher, her boyfriend, an ad man, and a capitalist f...

Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections On Ritual Space
Barbara McCullough
1980, 60 min., Color, US
This video investigates the use of ritual in the work of artists using different media. Here ritual is defined as the creation and utilization of objects, words or tones used in a repetitive or habitu...

Sky-blue Hometown
Soh-Young Kim
2000, 93 min., Color, Korea
This documentary traces the trajectory of a Korean diasporic community in the former Soviet Union. Placed in internment camps by Stalin during World War II, the plight of a generation of Korean-Russia...

Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition and Creative Progress
Jayne Cortez
Producer: Manthia Diawara
2009, 100 min., Color, US
From the 1400s to the 1800s millions of Africans were forcefully removed from Africa and shipped across the Atlantic to the so-called "New World". In 1808, the passage of the Transantlantic Slave Trad...

Slowly, This
Arthur Jafa
1995, 26 min., Color, US
When two friends meet in a crowded Manhattan restaurant, the conversation takes an unexpected and intimate turn. Speaking from their experiences as a Japanese American man and an African American man,...

Solitary Alchemist, The
Mariel Brown
2009, 70 min., Color, Trinidad/UK
What happens when talent isn’t enough? When, in spite of a life of work, you look around in the autumn of your life and discover that your world is not what you thought it would be. This is where we m...

Sweet Sugar Rage
Honor Ford-Smith & Harclyde Walcott
1985, 45 min., Color, Jamaica
A popular Jamaican women's troupe uses improvisation and theater as consciousness-raising tools for both rural and urban audiences. Their performances speak directly to the daily experiences of women-...

Undertow
Me-K Ahn
1995, 18 min., BW, US
"undertow" is an experimental short film which explores how the loss of family and culture can affect one's body consciousness and sexuality. It juxtaposes one adopted woman's reconstructed search for...

Urga Song
Jessica Woodworth
1999, 18 min., Color
URGA SONG is a lyrical cine-poem portraying democratic Mongolia from the perspective of young artists residing in the capital city of Ulaan Baatar. Poetic imagery of stark landscapes, dramatic citysca...

Viva Eu! (Long Live Me!)
Tania Cypriano
1989, 18 min., Color, US/Brazil/Spain
This documentary is a tribute to Wilton Braga, a visionary artist who was one of the first people to be diagnosed with AIDS in Brazil. As Braga travels to Barcelona, New York and Sao Paolo, the film ...

Wave: A True Story in Hip Hop
Tony Wesley & Brian Bullock
Producer: Tony Wesley & Brian Bullock
2016, 46 min., Color, US
See how the legendary Tony "Mr. Wave" Wesley went from a kid in the Bronx to an international B-Boy superstar to entrepreneur and activist. This film includes never before seen archival pictures and i...

What Do You Call An Indian Woman Who's Funny?
Gurinder Chadha
1994, 19 min., BW, UK
What do you call an Indian woman who's funny in 20th Century Britain? A British performer? A Black comedienne? An enigma? This humorous and comedic documentary, brings the laughs and dreams of four In...

Who's Afraid of Ngugi?
Manthia Diawara
2006, 83 min., Color, US/Kenya
Novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, editor, academic and social activist Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. In 1977 his novel Petals of Blood was publish...

Women and Men Are Good Dancers
Arlene Bowman
1994, 6 min., Color, US
"Women and Men Are Good Dancers," is a translation from the Cree language of an intertribal pow wow song. Bowman was inspired to create this tape by the "nizhoni" (Dine) or "it is beautiful" of the Pl...

The World Saxophone Quartet
Barbara McCullough
1980, 5 min., Color, US
A glance at an innovative quartet of jazz saxophonists, Hamiet Bluiet, Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, and David Murray, both in concert and conversation....

Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writers Dissecting Globalization
Jayne Cortez
2007, 75 min., Color, US
Globalization, now a buzzword in the West, has been a phenomenon that has shaped the culture and politics of Africa and its diaspora for centuries. YARI YARI PAMBERI brings together women from across ...

Yari Yari: Black Women Writers and the Future
Jayne Cortez
1999, 52 min., Color, US
Yari Yari -- Black Women Writers and the Future: An International Conference on Literature by Women of African Descent was held at New York University in October 1997. Yari Yari means "the future" in...

The Yellow Pages
Ho Tam
1995, 8 min., Color, US
Arranged from A to Z in 26 segments, The Yellow Pages looks at the relationship between imagery and text in the context of the Asian experience within North America and beyond. In a playful and satiri...

Yippie
Yippie
1968, 10 min., BW, US
Filmed as the official statement of the Youth International Party, this film is as freewheeling and irreverent as the Yippies themselves. It presents an overview of 1968 Chicago, Mayor Daley, and the...

Young Puppeteers of Vietnam
Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Producer: Democratic Peoples' Republic of Viet Nam
1969, 25 min., BW, Vietnam
Art, dance, music and poetry became a vital necessity for the liberated areas of South Vietnam in their daily efforts to survive the bombings and napalming of the Vietnam War. In this moving film, tee...


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TWN acknowledges that in New York we are on the unceded territory of the Lenni Lenape, Canarsie, Shinecock, and Munsee peoples and challenges the harm that continues to be inflicted upon Indigenous and People of Color communities here and abroad, which is why we all need to be part of the struggle for rights, equality and justice.

TWN is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Color Congress, MOSAIC, New York Community Trust, Peace Development Fund, Ford Foundation, Golden Globe Foundation, Kolibri Foundation and individual donors.