Wednesday, February 24
The Workers Unite! Film Festival offers an encore of Film Faves for Black History Month
ALL DAY: 9:00AM - 11:00PM EST

WATCH PAGE HERE

I Heard It Through the Grapevine - James Baldwin retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, reflecting with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades. [...] Baldwin lays bare the fiction of progress in post-Civil Rights America — wondering “what happened to the children” and those “who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on Freedom Road.” (Directed by Pat Hartley and Dick Fontaine, 1982, 1 hr 35m) (Clip)

Profiled - Knits together the stories of mothers of Black and Latin youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S. Some of the victims — Eric Garner, Michael Brown — are now familiar the world over. Others, like Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, are remembered mostly by family and friends in their New York neighborhoods. (Directed by Kathleen Foster, 2016, 52m) (Trailer)

Trouble Finds You - Bronx native and Masters student Kraig Lewis has his life turned upside down when he gets caught up in New York's largest gang take down. Now he was to find a new path. [...] Lewis, along with 119 others, were prosecuted under a law originally designed to target mobs but are now increasingly used against low-income neighborhoods of color in New York. (Directed by Stephanie Tangkilisan, 2019, 26 min) (Trailer)

 

Quarantina - Director Pat Hartley (I Heard It Through the Grapevine) talks about being an older black woman amid the COVID-19 pandemic. (2021, 3 min)

 

Filmmaker Justin Thomas on Black Film, Art and Activism (Free)

The award-winning filmmaker and WUFF alumnus discusses the motivation for creating the Black Independent Filmmaker App to support filmmakers of color in the independent community. In addition, he will share stories behind his two documentaries Truth Through A Lens and Sophia Dawson: PURPOSE, and how social justice and activism are driving factors that inform much of his film work.

Available as a pre-recorded event.

June 17-20, 2021
2021 Great Labor Arts Exchange: Singing Through the Hard Times
Join in a celebration of the life and work of Anne Feeney. Details to follow.

LABOR MOVIES STREAMING NOW
The Killing Floor
Directed by Bill Duke • 1984 • United States
Starring Damien Leake, Alfre Woodard, Moses Gunn
Originally broadcast on PBS’s “American Playhouse” in 1984, the stirring first feature from actor and filmmaker Bill Duke explores the little-known story of an African American migrant’s struggle to build an interracial union in the Chicago Stockyards. Based on actual characters and events, the screenplay by Leslie Lee, from a story by producer Elsa Rassbach, follows the journey of Frank Custer (Damien Leake), a young Black sharecropper from Mississippi who, in the aftermath of World War I, travels to Chicago for a job on the “killing floor” of a meatpacking plant and the promise of greater racial equality in the industrial North. There, he must navigate the seething ethnic and class conflicts—stoked by management and culminating in the Chicago race riot of 1919—as he attempts to unite his fellow workers in a fight for fair treatment.

Three by Madeline Anderson
Recognized as the first Black woman to direct a televised documentary film, Madeline Anderson brings viewers to the front lines of the civil rights movement in these essential records of struggle and determination. Capturing a pivotal labor strike led by Black female hospital employees (I AM SOMEBODY), early desegregation efforts by Martin Luther King Jr. (INTEGRATION REPORT 1), and a rare interview with Malcolm X’s widow, Dr. Betty Shabazz (A TRIBUTE TO MALCOLM X), Anderson’s documentaries are a testament to the courage of the workers and activists at the heart of her films as well as to her own bravery, tenacity, and skill.

Solomon Northup’s Odyssey
Directed by Gordon Parks • 1984 • United States
Starring Avery Brooks, Rhetta Greene, Petronia Paley
Gordon Parks directs the original film adaptation of abolitionist Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography “Twelve Years a Slave,” later the basis for the Academy Award–winning drama by Steve McQueen. Avery Brooks stars as Northup, a free Black man born in New York who was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and held in bondage in Louisiana for more than a decade. Originally aired on PBS, SOLOMON NORTHUP’S ODYSSEY brings his powerful tale of perseverance and resistance to the screen with searing conviction.