L.A. Rebellion Plays at Lincoln Center
A Visceral Picture of Black Life Brought to Film by Black Artists
By: Susan Hall - Apr 23, 2025
In the 1960s, white documentary director Nick Webster pieced together Black voices on film and earned an Emmy nomination for Walk in My Shoes. Around the same time, Melvin Van Peebles fled to Paris to secure funding for his films. Ossie Davis directed Cotton Comes to Harlem, while Gordon Parks Sr. and Jr. embraced the spirit of blaxploitation cinema.
In 1968, UCLA launched a groundbreaking initiative to increase enrollment of Black, Latino, Native American, and Asian film students. Though the program ended in 1973, it had already admitted a significant number of students of color, many of whom later attracted others to UCLA. This initiative produced a remarkable group of Black filmmakers, including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima, Jamaa Fanaka, Barbara McCullough, Larry Clark, Alile Sharon Larkin, Ben Caldwell, and Zeinabu irene Davis. Over the decades, these artists became internationally acclaimed as the founding voices of a unique cinematic movement—celebrated for its stark naturalism, poetic imagery, and its honest, unfiltered portrayal of underrepresented lives.
The films created by this generation of Black filmmakers brought Black culture—long misunderstood or maligned—into sharp and moving focus. Their documentaries and feature films presented Black life with visceral clarity. This wave, known as the L.A. Rebellion, transformed not only Black cinema but also American film culture as a whole.
Film at Lincoln Center presents L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now, running from April 25 to May 4. Among the highlights is Julie Dash’s enduring masterpiece Daughters of the Dust, a film that broke convention with its use of dual narration—one voice from the unborn child and the other from the family’s matriarch. Traditionally, narrators had to be alive and singular, but Dash’s film defied these norms. The result is a lyrical tone poem that moves between tradition and future, interweaving ancestral memory with dreams of what’s to come.
We witness the journey of Ibo descendants—brought to America in chains—who, despite slavery, preserved family legacies and African customs in their isolated coastal communities. As they prepare to leave their land and loved ones behind, there is a powerful sense that they are both departing and remaining. The family becomes one unified presence, caught between tradition and modernity.
Dash’s film blurs past and present, weaving memory into its fabric. Though we may not always understand every word, the emotions—especially during the stunning picnic scenes—resonate deeply. The tableau shots freeze time, capturing the family like figures in an old photograph.
This film series pairs iconic and lesser-known works from the L.A. Rebellion with contemporary films by a new generation of artists from Africa, its global diaspora, and the U.S. Alongside influential works by African contemporaries of the original Rebellion filmmakers, the program reveals how these intergenerational artists share a mission: to reflect the full complexity of Black experiences and reframe how Black lives are portrayed to global audiences.
Tickets here.
including:
Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema at UCLA
Zeinabu irene Davis
- 2016
- U.S.
- 100 minutes
Zeinabu irene Davis’s documentary compiles a trove of interviews with visionary directors Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and more that provides an overview of the L.A. Rebellion movement. Screening with a special work-in-progress short film by Jérémie Danon and Kiddy Smile.
April 25 3:00 PM
April 29 6:00 PM
Welcome Home, Brother Charles
- Jamaa Fanaka
- 1975
- U.S.
- 35mm
- 91 minutes
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.
May 3 1:45 PM
Joe Bullet
- Louis de Witt
- 1973
- South Africa
- 79 minutes
In the mold of Shaft and James Bond, Joe Bullet’s hero fights the saboteurs who hope to undermine his soccer team in an upcoming championship game. This South African Apartheid-era film, one of the first to feature an all-Black cast, was banned by the government after just two screenings.
May 3 4 PM
Passing Through
- Larry Clark
- 1977
- U.S.
- 105 minutes
Passing Through follows a talented jazz saxophonist who, recently released from prison, hopes to establish an artist-owned musical collective—to the chagrin of the mob-affiliated crooks controlling the music industry.
April 27 6:00 PM
April 29 9:00 PM
Rewind & Play
- Alain Gomis
- 2022
- France/Germany
- 66 minutes
- English and French with English subtitles
Using newly discovered footage from the recording of a 1969 French television interview with the legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis has constructed a gripping behind-the-scenes documentary; a subtle yet searing exposé of casual racism; and a chance to see one of the monumental geniuses of 20th-century music at work
April 27 8:45
Bush Mama
Haile Gerima
1979
U.S
97 minutes
Q&A with Haile Gerima on April 25