Film at Lincoln Center Celebrates L.A. Rebellion’s Enduring Legacy with New Retrospective

To Sleep with Anger, Hanami, Daughters of the Dust, Bless Their Little Hearts, and Hyenas

Film at Lincoln Center Celebrates L.A. Rebellion’s Enduring Legacy with New Retrospective

Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) has announced a landmark film series, L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now, running from April 25 through May 4. The program honors the revolutionary group of African, Caribbean, and African American filmmakers and video artists who emerged from UCLA in the 1970s and ’80s. Known collectively as the L.A. Rebellion, these artists transformed Black cinema—and American film culture—by creating deeply personal, politically engaged works that challenged dominant narratives and reframed the portrayal of Black life on screen.

This expansive retrospective brings together rarely screened gems from the original L.A. Rebellion cohort with bold new works by emerging filmmakers from Africa, the African diaspora, and the United States. These pairings illuminate shared themes of love, migration, gentrification, incarceration, and cultural resistance across generations and continents. The result is a cinematic dialogue that reveals how the spirit of the L.A. Rebellion continues to shape global Black storytelling.

Among the featured films are Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977) and Alain Gomis’s Rewind & Play (2022), which take unflinching looks at racism and exploitation in the jazz world. Julie Dash’s seminal Daughters of the Dust (1991) will screen alongside Denise Fernandes’s Hanami (2024), both exploring the inner lives of women in transition. The series opens with Zeinabu irene Davis’s documentary Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema at UCLA (2016), a vital oral history featuring the voices of Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima, Julie Dash, and others reflecting on their groundbreaking work.

This retrospective also revisits the origins of the movement. In 1968, UCLA launched an admissions initiative to diversify its film program. Though it formally ended in 1973, the impact was profound. A generation of Black filmmakers—Burnett, Dash, Gerima, Fanaka, and more—found community and purpose, laying the foundation for a cinematic movement marked by stark naturalism, poetic realism, and urgent political vision.

Audiences can experience these films in curated double features, allowing for deep engagement with recurring motifs and evolving aesthetics. On April 26, a free public talk titled Reframing Black Stories on Screen will feature curator Claire Diao and a panel of filmmakers, scholars, and journalists in conversation about the legacy of the L.A. Rebellion and its global resonance.

L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now is curated by Claire Diao and co-organized by Madeline Whittle. The series is sponsored by MUBI, the global streaming service and film distributor.

Tickets go on sale Wednesday, March 26 at 2 p.m., with early access beginning at noon for FLC Members. General admission is $17; discounted tickets are available for students, seniors, and persons with disabilities. Special packages and all-access passes are also available.

For full program details, visit filmlinc.org.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen in the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th St.)

Black Life on Screen

Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema at UCLA
Zeinabu irene Davis, 2016, U.S., 100m
“What is a Black film?” is the inciting question at the heart of Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema at UCLA, Zeinabu irene Davis’s retrospective documentary that shines a light on the radical aesthetic innovations and interventions that emerged from a collective of radically inquisitive, steadfastly humanist filmmakers who took seriously the imperative to create films about—and for—their own communities. Davis, herself a member of the history-making cohort who enrolled at UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television during a period stretching from the late 1960s well into the ’80s, compiles a precious trove of interviews with visionary directors Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and more, all of whom offer generous, intimate testimonies reflecting on their own artistic practice, their influences and inspirations, and the evolution of Black cinema and its complicated relationship with the Hollywood film industry in the second half of the 20th century. A new short film to be announced will screen before Davis’s feature documentary.
Friday, April 25 at 3:00pm
Tuesday, April 29 at 6:00pm

Cinemas of Revenge

Welcome Home, Brother Charles
Jamaa Fanaka, 1975, U.S., 35mm, 91m
The debut feature by the late visionary director Jamaa Fanaka—for which Charles Burnett served as camera operator alongside George Geddis—stands simultaneously as an essential distillation of the Blaxploitation revenge genre in all its outrageously cinematic splendor, and as an incisive, surrealist critique of the political meanings that animate the genre’s well-worn conventions. Wrongly imprisoned, Charles Murray (Marlo Monte) seeks to wreak vengeance on the detective who framed him, and on the systemic racism of the legal structures that allowed him to do so. Cannily playing with the mythologies surrounding Black male sexuality and the racial politics of power and desire, Fanaka interrogates the corrupt white establishment’s caricatures of the African American community, suggesting that below-the-belt revolt might be as effective a tactic as any for driving progress.

35mm print courtesy of the L.A. Rebellion collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Saturday, May 3 at 1:45pm

Joe Bullet
Louis de Witt, 1973, South Africa, 79m
During the period of South African Apartheid that spanned much of the latter half of the 20th century, the nation’s segregated filmmaking apparatus witnessed a surprisingly vigorous movement of white producers and filmmakers investing in the production of films for Black audiences, eventually with the support of “B-scheme” government subsidies. Shot in 1971 under the auspices of screenwriter Tonie van der Merwe’s self-financed production outfit, director Louis de Witt’s Joe Bullet was one of the first South African films to feature an all-Black cast—and was banned by government censors after just two screenings. Tall, handsome, and athletic, the titular hero (Ken Gampu) was reportedly conceived in the mold of Shaft and James Bond, fighting, stabbing, and shooting at the nefarious saboteurs who hope to undermine his soccer team in an upcoming championship game.
Saturday, May 3 at 4:00pm

On Jazz

Passing Through
Larry Clark, 1977, U.S., 105m
Completed as his Master’s thesis project during his graduate studies at UCLA, Larry Clark’s Passing Through takes jazz as a prism through which to examine the perpetually colluding forces of American capitalism and American racism. The narrative follows a talented saxophonist, Eddie Warmack (Nathaniel Taylor) who, recently released from prison, hopes to persuade his grandfather and mentor to join him in establishing an artist-owned musical collective—to the chagrin of the mob-affiliated crooks controlling the music industry with an iron grip. Featuring camera and sound work by Clark’s UCLA classmates Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, the film situates this artistic milieu in the context of ongoing political struggles in the U.S. and abroad—not least via pointed visual references to the political fights for independence that swept the African continent in the 1970s—and deploys the liberatory aesthetic and formal spontaneity of free jazz to compose a stunning, vividly realized tribute to a thriving Black creative community, far from the blinkered myopia of the midcentury Hollywood canon.

Digital presentation courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Sunday, April 27 at 6:00pm
Tuesday, April 29 at 9:00pm

Rewind & Play
Alain Gomis, 2022, France/Germany, 66m
English and French with English subtitles
In December 1969, Thelonious Monk arrived in Paris for a concert at the tail end of a European tour. While there, the legendary jazz pianist was invited to appear on a television interview program, where he would perform and answer questions in an intimate, one-on-one studio stage. Using newly discovered footage from the recording of the interview, versatile French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis (whose dazzling music-tinged drama Félicité played in NYFF’s Main Slate in 2017) reveals the troubling dynamic between Monk and his white interviewer, Henri Renaud, and how Monk stands his ground despite being antagonized by Renaud’s trivializing approach. Gomis’s gripping film is a fascinating behind-the-scenes documentary; a subtle yet searing exposé of casual racism; and, above all, a chance to see one of the monumental geniuses of 20th-century music at work. A Grasshopper Film release. An NYFF60 Currents selection.
Sunday, April 27 at 8:45pm

On Political Engagement

Bush Mama
Haile Gerima, 1979, U.S., 97m
In Bush Mama, Ethiopian-born director Haile Gerima tracks the experiences of Dorothy (Barbara O. Jones), a Black mother living in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, as she grapples with the imprisonment of her Vietnam vet husband and navigates the bureaucratic tangles of public assistance. Her world is rendered with an unflinching neorealist lens, but these scenes are also teamed with formally experimental dispatches from Dorothy’s turbulent inner life. She finds herself in overwhelming circumstances, yet talk of liberation buzzes all around her, a response to relentless police violence and capitalist exploitation. Bush Mama, through its fractured, captivating drama of political awakening, showed us Los Angeles as Hollywood never had.

Digital presentation courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Friday, April 25 at 9:15pm
Monday, April 28 at 6:15pm

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, 2019, Lesotho/South Africa/Italy, 120m
Sesotho with English subtitles
In the mountains of Lesotho, an 80-year-old widow named Mantoa eagerly awaits the return of her son—her only living kin—from the South African mines where he works. When instead she receives news of his death, she puts her affairs in order and makes arrangements to be buried in the local cemetery. Her careful plans are upset abruptly by the news that provincial officials intend to resettle the village, flood the entire area, and build a dam for a reservoir. Determined to die on her own terms and in her own land, Mantoa resolves to defend the spiritual heritage of her community. A Dekanalog release.
Monday, April 28 at 8:30pm

On Incarceration

Penitentiary
Jamaa Fanaka, 1979, U.S., 35mm, 99m
When a solitary hitchhiker (Leon Isaac Kennedy) is charged with the murder of a white man following a dispute over a sex worker, he is swiftly jailed and must adapt to the fraught new reality of his life as a prisoner, caught between animality and humanity, lucidity and madness, brutality and cunning, where the weakest are compelled to ally with the strongest, and the boxing ring promises the best hope at survival and escape. Produced, written, and directed by Jamaa Fanaka, Penitentiary is a lacerating dissection of the Blaxploitation, crime, and prison genres that also deftly exemplifies those genres’ capacity for political and social commentary. By deploying a formal framework where off-screen sounds and unseen reveries override the physical confinement of his characters, Fanaka simultaneously reflects on the widespread alienation of Black life in America, and condemns the carceral system that perpetuates those effects generation after generation.

35mm print courtesy of the L.A. Rebellion collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Saturday, May 3 at 6:00pm

Night of the Kings
Philippe Lacôte, 2020, France/Ivory Coast/Canada/Senegal, 93m
Dioula, French, and Ivorian slang with English subtitles
At the Maca correctional facility in the Ivorian capital of Abidjan, the inmates run the prison, a place all but ruled by folkloric superstitions. Tonight, upon the rising of a red moon, a newly arrived prisoner (Koné Bakary), jailed for pickpocketing, has been selected by the autocratic Lord Blackbeard to assume the position of “Roman storyteller”: he must keep his fellow inmates entertained with wild tales or risk his own life. As this Scheherazade-like scenario unfolds, he tells the story of Zama, the childhood friend who became a legendary crime boss. Paying homage to the tradition of the griot in West African culture, Night of the Kings is a work of Shakespearean fabulism and gripping, energetic filmmaking, an altogether original vision from Ivory Coast filmmaker Philippe Lacôte. A NEON release. An NYFF58 Main Slate selection.
Saturday, May 3 at 8:15pm

The Veteran's Experience

Ashes and Embers
Haile Gerima, 1982, U.S., 126m
Following on the heels of Bush Mama, Haile Gerima’s third feature Ashes and Embers offers a stirring account of the challenges and upheavals faced by Black veterans of the Vietnam War, represented here in the form of Nay Charles (John Anderson), an African American soldier who, upon returning to his hometown after a stint in Vietnam, struggles with newfound disenchantment and alienation as he attempts to reconnect with the decidedly American way of life he once inhabited. Caught between the competing pressures and contradictions of a Black middle-class content to accommodate the brutality of the existing power structure and a heterogeneous coalition of radical activists with the will, if not the resources, to transform a society rooted in racism, Charles decamps for Los Angeles, only to discover the impossibility of escaping the legacies of systematic discrimination and disenfranchisement that continue to resonate in American society.
Saturday, April 26 at 6:00pm
Wednesday, April 30 at 6:00pm

Camp de Thiaroye
Ousmane Sembène, Thierno Faty Sow, 1988, Senegal/Algeria/Tunisia, 154m
Wolof, French, and German with English subtitles
Sensitively probing the legacy of a colonial postwar tragedy in Senegal, the legendary Ousmane Sembène partnered with Thierno Faty Sow to craft this rich, enraging work of cinema as historical corrective. Camp de Thiaroye chronicles the lead-up to the Thiaroye Massacre, a horrific event in which the French military murdered hundreds of West African soldiers, freshly returned from serving in the European theater of WWII, for their righteous insistence upon receiving their promised (and unpaid) wages and benefits. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1988 Venice Film Festival, Camp de Thiaroye was banned in France for more than a decade; it endures as one of cinema’s most powerful and precise portraits of both war and colonial racism. An NYFF62 Revivals selection.

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with the Tunisian Ministry of Culture and the Senegalese Ministry of Culture and Historical Heritage. Special thanks to Mohammed Challouf. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO—in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna—to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.
Saturday, April 26 at 9:00pm 

On Gentrification

Residue
Merawi Gerima, 2020, U.S., 90m
Forty years after his mother, Shirikiana Aina, directed her seminal short film Brick by Brick, the artist Merawi Gerima took up the gauntlet, expanding upon the themes of Aina’s lyrical cinematic meditation and applying them in the context of 21st-century Washington D.C., where Gerima’s protagonist, young filmmaker Jay (Obinna Nwachukwu), returns home after many years away. Seeking to reconnect with the memories, spaces, and lingering traces of his childhood, he instead discovers that his old neighborhood is no longer recognizable, and many of his old friends have met with a tragic fate. Premiering during the pandemic era at the Slamdance Film Festival before going on to screen at the Venice Film Festival, Residue is at once a reflection on the lived experience of gentrification and a layered, authentic portrait of the Black Lives Matter generation.

Screening with:
Brick by Brick
Shirikiana Aina, 1982, U.S., 37min
Shirikiana Aina—one of the few women members in the original cohort of student filmmakers who would come to be known collectively as the L.A. Rebellion—documented the stigmatization of Black residents within the Washington D.C. area in her first film, produced during her final year at UCLA. Brick by Brick depicts families and individuals, otherwise ignored by the media, who were then in the process of being pushed out of their homes. Gentrification and urban redevelopment are at the core of this powerful short, which captures the extraordinary spirit of a neighborhood community that came together to fight against the perpetuation of a systemic injustice.

Digital presentation courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Friday, April 25 at 6:00pm
Wednesday, April 30 at 8:30pm

On Black Love

Bless Their Little Hearts
Billy Woodberry, 1984, U.S., 35mm, 80m
The lone narrative feature from director Billy Woodberry, Bless Their Little Hearts exemplifies the rigorous commitment to collaborative art-making that defined the L.A. Rebellion’s collective practice—in this case, a collaboration between Woodberry and Charles Burnett, who scripted and lensed the film, and facilitated the casting of friends and family members who had previously acted in Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding. Woodberry’s film unfolds in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, several years after the 1969 Watts riots; its protagonist, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman), is unemployed and unable to financially support his wife (Kaycee Moore) and their three children. Training a keen eye on the psychological ravages of underemployment and economic discrimination—and sensitively attending to the intimate dynamics of a marriage in crisis—Woodberry and Burnett’s extraordinary shared vision endures as a paradigmatic masterpiece of poetic neorealism, more than 40 years after its Cannes Critics’ Week premiere.

35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Thursday, May 1 at 6:30pm
Sunday, May 4 at 1:00pm

If Beale Street Could Talk
Barry Jenkins, 2018, U.S., 117m
Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Moonlight is a carefully wrought adaptation of James Baldwin’s penultimate novel, set in Harlem in the early 1970s. Fonny (Stephan James) and Tish (KiKi Layne) are childhood friends who fall in love as young adults. Tish becomes pregnant, and Fonny suffers a fate tragically common to young African American men: he is arrested and convicted for a crime he didn’t commit. Jenkins’s deeply soulful film stays focused on the emotional currents between parents and children, couples and friends, all of whom spend their lives repairing and reinforcing the precious but fraying bonds of family and community in an unforgiving, racist world. An NYFF56 Main Slate selection.
Thursday, May 1 at 8:30pm

Into the 1990s

To Sleep with Anger 
Charles Burnett, 1990, U.S., 102m
Charles Burnett burst onto the world stage when his 1978 UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep, won the Critics’ Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. His legendary reputation among cinephiles never quite segued into mainstream recognition, even though his 1990 drama To Sleep with Anger—novelistic in its narrative density and rich characterization—is one of the finest films about the Black experience in modern America. Danny Glover (also the film’s executive producer) stars as Harry Mention, a mysterious drifter from the South who visits an old acquaintance (Paul Butler), now leading a middle-class life with his family in South Central Los Angeles. Though imbued with charm and traditional manners, Harry has a knack for mischief that creates powerful rifts throughout the family. Burnett’s overlooked masterpiece connects the past to the present in emotionally resonant ways, making this film as imaginative and insightful as his debut feature. An NYFF28 Main Slate selection.
Sunday, April 27 at 1:15pm
Friday, May 2 at 3:30pm

Hyenas
Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992, Senegal/Switzerland/France, 110m
“When a story ends—or ‘falls into the ocean,’ as we say—it creates dreams,” said the great Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty in an interview after the completion of his second film, Hyenas, a wildly freeform adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit. A wealthy woman (Ami Diakhate) returns to her—and Mambéty’s—home village, and offers the inhabitants a vast sum in exchange for the murder of the local man who seduced and abandoned her when she was young. “I do not refuse the word didactic,” said Mambéty of his very special body of work, and of the particular plight of African cinema. “My task was to identify the enemy of humankind: money, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. I think my target is clear.” An NYFF30 Main Slate selection.

Restored over the course of 2017 by Eclair Digital in Vanves, France. Restoration was taken on by Thelma Film AG (Switzerland).
Sunday, April 27 at 3:30pm

Women's Destinies

Daughters of the Dust
Julie Dash, 1992, U.S., 35mm, 113m
Following a run of acclaimed short films, writer-director-producer Julie Dash made history with her 1992 fiction feature debut Daughters of the Dust, the first film directed by an African American woman to receive a national theatrical release. Set just after the turn of the 20th century, Dash’s richly evocative screenplay sketches an impressionistic portrait of the Gullah people—an independent community of formerly enslaved people and their descendents living on the Sea Islands off the coast of North Carolina and Georgia. Adopting a circular narrative structure, with voice-over narration supplied by the spirit of an unborn child who speaks in Gullah Creole, the film follows three generations of women from the Peazant family as they prepare to migrate to the mainland, giving rise to a lyrical meditation on the American experience of diaspora, embodied by characters torn between their attachment to the traditions and ways of life handed down by their African ancestors on the one hand, and on the other the desire to embrace a more “modern”—if not necessarily better—life in the industrialized North.

35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Friday, May 2 at 6:00pm
Sunday, May 4 at 3:00pm

Hanami
Denise Fernandes, 2024, Cape Verde/Switzerland/Portugal, 93m
Portuguese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Winner of the Best Emerging Director award and a Special Mention in the First Feature competition at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, Cape Verdean-Swiss director Denise Fernandes expands on the themes that she probed with restrained eloquence in her 2020 short film Nha Mila (New Directors/New Films 2021) with her stunning feature debut, a beguiling coming-of-age fable that continues the filmmaker’s tender, emotionally precise inquiry into specifically diasporic experiences of displacement and belonging. Embracing a cinematic style of understated poetry and stirring oneirism, Hanami introduces viewers to the insular community of Djarfogo, where each successive generation is confronted with the dilemma of leaving for new opportunities abroad or staying put, perpetuating a way of life that all of its adherents seem eager to escape. It’s in this context that young Nana (played at different ages by gifted first-time actresses Sanaya Andrade and Daílma Mendes) navigates the onset of adolescence, all the while grappling with the ever-looming absence of a mother who left years ago, in the child’s infancy, to seek treatment for a mysterious ailment.
Friday, May 2 at 9:00pm

Free Talk: Reframing Black Stories on Screen
Join programmer Claire Diao and a panel of filmmakers, scholars, and journalists for a wide-ranging conversation in which they’ll explore the history of the L.A. Rebellion, its formal and thematic influences on contemporary artists, and how the reception of films produced in Africa and throughout its diaspora has evolved since the 1970s.
Saturday, April 26 at 4:00pm – Amphitheater at Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (144 W. 65th St.)