African-American
see all genres ›Black audiences were usually segregated into their own seating sections of mainstream movie houses for decades (when they were allowed at all) but they also had low-budget films produced exclusively for "black" cinemas from the silent era until the dawn of the civil rights era. The latter eventually brought black subjects and actors to all audiences, sparking both the 1970s "blaxploitation" boom and the ascendancy of African American-themed films of the present.
Watch African-American Films
Genres / Drama / Ethnicity / African-American
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The Watermelon Woman
Cheryl Dunye's debut feature is as controversial as it is sexy and funny. Cheryl is a twenty-something black lesbian working as a clerk in a video store while struggling to make a documentary about Fae Richards, an obscure black actress from the 1930's. Cheryl is surprised to...Watch Movie
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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG is the story of a young hustler whose aimless pleasure seeking turns to radicalism after witnessing the beating of a black revolutionary by two white cops. Sweetback, driven to a state of blind rage, takes brutal revenge on the cops, forcing...Watch Movie
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The Cry of Jazz
Filmed in Chicago and finished in 1959, THE CRY OF JAZZ is filmmaker, composer and arranger Edward O. Bland's polemical essay on the politics of music and race: a forecast of what he called "the death of jazz." A landmark moment in black film, foreseeing the civil unrest of subsequent decades, it...Watch Movie
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Of Mind and Music
A lyrical and extraordinarily beautiful story woven together by the music that permeates New Orleans and the jazz that made it famous. Renowned Neuroscientist Dr. Alvaro Cruz returns home from a lecture in Paris, heartbroken and disillusioned. In his absence, his mother has...Watch Movie
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I Passed for White
A beautiful young woman meets and marries the man of her dreams, only she hasn't told him that she is half-black, and he and his rich family and friends are white. She soon discovers that happiness cannot be founded on a lie. Please excuse the poor source quality of this film.Watch Movie
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Black Like Me
Based on the landmark memoir by John Howard Griffin, BLACK LIKE ME stars James Whitmore as Griffin, who medically altered his pigment and, with the help of a sunlamp, reinvented himself as an itinerant black writer navigating his way through Mississippi and Alabama. Along the way he experienced...Watch Movie
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Almos' a Man
Although Dave (LeVar Burton) and his family are poor sharecroppers in the Deep South in the 1930's, this 15-year-olds problem is shared by teenagers today: he stands with one foot in adulthood and the other in childhood. Almost a man, yet still treated like a child, he struggles for an identity....Watch Movie
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Vengeance Is Mine
A young man goes back to his hometown, a very rough neighborhood with even rougher residents. He sets out to demonstrate that, with the love and belief in the Lord, people can change for the better. This 1971 film stars Booker Bradshaw, Gloria Calomee and Vince Howard. It was...Watch Movie
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Forged Ways
Photographed on-location, FORGED WAYS combines elements of documentary, narrative and experimental film form. Structurally the film cycles between the first person account of filmmaker, the third person experience of a man navigating the streets of Harlem and day-to-day life in cities and...Watch Movie
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The Sky is Gray
From Ernest J. Gaines, author of “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman”, comes a deceptively simple, yet emotionally complex tale of a young boy's discovery of what it's like to be black in Louisiana during the 1940's. James, the boy in question, has a raging toothache that necessitates a trip...Watch Movie
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The Broken Mask
A young white collegian and a fellow black student struggling for understanding come to realize that living together harmoniously is a two-way street. This film about racial relationships points out that no matter what the color of the skin, God created man to share one blood. The film's story...Watch Movie
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His Trust
HIS TRUST, subtitled "the faithful devotion and self- sacrifice of an old negro servant," is something of a race-relations precursor to D.W. Griffith's better-known BIRTH OF A NATION. The aforementioned servant is played in blackface, unfortunately, but the character's portrayal might surprise...Watch Movie
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
A story of violence and desire, of tenderness and compassion, so gripping and moving, which lays bare the trials and sufferings, the yearnings and aspirations of three generations of an African American family. The journey of a family from the rural South to "big city" Harlem...Watch Movie
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His Trust Fulfilled
D. W. Griffith's loose sequel to HIS TRUST features George the "negro servant" who, after looking after the widow and daughter of his slain Confederate master in the first film, is now called upon to look after the girl when her mother dies. George's sacrifices to place the...Watch Movie
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A Morning Bath
A remake of rival Biograph's popular A HARD WASH, this film's "joke" plays with racist clichés as well as theatrical conventions where blacks, whether impersonated by white actors or played by African Americans, performed using burnt cork as "masks." No matter how vigorous the bath, the baby's...Watch Movie
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Solomon Northup's Odyssey
To be a free man and a man with a trade, was a lot to be proud of for a Black man in 19th Century America. Solomon Northup was such a man. Then, one fateful day, his good life and all his dreams came to a crashing halt. Solomon Northup was kidnapped and carried off into...Watch Movie
