Life's Essentials with Ruby Dee

Integration Report 1

1960

Integration Report 1, Madeline Anderson's trailblazing debut, was the first known documentary by an African American female director. With tenacity, empathy and skill, Anderson assembles a vital record of desegregation efforts around the country in 1959 and 1960, featuring footage by documentary legends Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock and early Black cameraman Robert Puello, singing by Maya Angelou, and narration by playwright Loften Mitchell. Anderson fleetly moves from sit-ins in Montgomery, Alabama to a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C. to a protest of the unprosecuted death in police custody of an unarmed Black man in Brooklyn, capturing the incredible reach and scope of the civil rights movement, and working with this diverse of footage, as she would later say, “like an artist with a palette using different colors.”

A City Decides

1956

A City Decides chronicles the events that led to the integration of the St. Louis public schools in 1954. An Oscar-nominated short documentary from 1956.

Two Trains Runnin'

2016

The search of several young, white men for blues singers who have been missing for decades coincides with the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the 1960s.

A Long Way from Home: The Untold Story of Baseball's Desegregation

2018

Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line in 1947, but it took another generation of Black and Latino players to make the sport truly open to all. Playing in remote minor-league towns, these were the men who, before they could live their big-league dreams, first had to beat Jim Crow.

Obaida

2019

OBAIDA, a short film by Matthew Cassel, explores a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli military arrest. Each year, some 700 Palestinian children undergo military detention in a system where ill-treatment is widespread and institutionalized. For these young detainees, few rights are guaranteed, even on paper. After release, the experience of detention continues to shape and mark former child prisoners’ path forward.

James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket

1989

James Baldwin was at once a major 20th century American author, a Civil Rights activist and, for two crucial decades, a prophetic voice calling Americans, black and white, to confront their shared racial tragedy.

Home of the Brave

2004

Documentary on the civil rights activist, Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered in 1965 as she campaigned for black suffrage in Selma, Alabama, and its effect on her family.

Cannabis : Une enquête de Mathieu Kassovitz et Antoine Robin

2024

Ferguson Rises

2021

Before George Floyd, before Breonna Taylor, before America knew about Black Lives Matter, there was Michael Brown, Jr. On August 9th, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed Brown. The community reacted in protest, anger, frustration, and fear. Six years later, a new story emerges - one filled with hope, love, and beauty.

Ghosts of Ole Miss

2012

In the fall of 1962, a dramatic series of events made Civil Rights history and changed a way of life. On the eve of James Meredith becoming the first African-American to attend class at the University of Mississippi, the campus erupted into a night of rioting between those opposed to the integration of the school and those trying to enforce it. Before the rioting ended, the National Guard and Federal troops were called in to put an end to the violence and enforce Meredith's rights as an American citizen.

We The People 2.0

2016

American citizens who are normally marginalized, forgotten and left to fend against toxic dumps and other violations, come to understand that the only way to survive and save their communities is to challenge the system head-on.

Boblo Boats: A Detroit Ferry Tale

2021

For over 85 years, steamship Ste. Claire transported generations of Detroiters to Boblo Island, an amusement park nestled in the waters between the US and Canada. When the vessel comes under threat of ruin, a doctor, psychic and amusement park fanatic unite to save their beloved steamship from the scrapyard. Interweaving local lore and mythology, "Boblo Boats" explores the whitewashed history of amusement parks and one crew's crusade to bring back the memories.

Political Animals

2016

The story of four pioneering lesbian politicians and the battles they fought to pass a wide range of anti-discrimination laws.

I Heard It Through the Grapevine

1982

Renowned Black writer 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. From Selma and Birmingham and Atlanta; to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida, with Chinua Achebe; and back north for a visit to Newark with Amiri Baraka, 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'.

The Uncomfortable Truth

2018

When the award-winning filmmaker of "An Ordinary Hero", Loki Mulholland, dives into the 400 year history of institutional racism in America he is confronted with the shocking reality that his family helped start it all from the very beginning.