African American Spotlight

A man is brought back from the dead to work in the hell of sugar cane plantations. 55 years later, a Haitian teenager tells her friends her family secret – not suspecting that it will push one of them to commit the irreparable.

Racial injustice and cultural erasure weigh on a black man marrying into a white family.

A documentary-form narrative about mourners at Miami’s annual “T Ball” remembering lives lost.

This provocative documentary explores the intersection of art, activism, and social justice in Johannesburg. When artists/activists Masello and Evan take up residence in an abandoned mansion in an affluent part of Johannesburg, they proclaim their occupation to be an artistic and political act in defiance of inequalities in land ownership in South Africa. Is it illegal squatting, or political protest? Do these disenfranchised individuals have a valid claim to land that centuries ago was stolen?

An exploration of fear and its effects, this documentary chronicles the events surrounding a 2010 police shooting at UF. Potential racial profiling, an apparent lack of understanding regarding mental health, and fear of the unknown seem to contribute to Kofi, a black student from Ghana, being shot repeatedly in his own apartment.

A powerful and riveting narrative based on the true story of Ifrah Ahmed, who — having escaped war-torn Somalia — has emerged as one of the world’s foremost international activists against gender-based violence.

Shot from atop a telephone pole, this one-take wonder watches a neighborhood’s day unfold.

Pier Kids is a verité documentary that’s inspired by Marlon Riggs’s Black is Black Ain’t and the Maysles brothers Gray Gardens, and Field Niggas by Khalik Allah. The film was made in the moment run and gun guerilla style. The interviews are often on the go to reflect the transience experienced by the characters. Like the work of Marlon Riggs, Elegance the film’s director is character on and off screen. The viewer is offered a type of access that’s rare in documentary films. It’s goal is to shrink the distance between the concepts of racial/gender marginalization by making the experience personal and specific. The film asserts that the individual experience of black queer life is not complete without engaging the community at large. The film is also an act of resistance to traditional storytelling forms. The director wanted to make a film in a visual language that mimics the way the people on screen speak and share knowledge with each other. People appear in this film, form a meaningful connection, and disappear without any explanation. It means so much that the audience experience the sense of loss in a way as similar as possible to what the Pier Kids experience. This is the only way to make their plight palpable so that viewers can no longer play innocent. The film is also about the value of public space for brown and black queer bodies to become their most realized versions of themselves. The film is mostly shot outdoors on purpose. It sees the presence of these bodies in this space as natural and necessary. Pier Kids is directed by the truth of the experience of coming of age outside.

Filmed inside a historic Sarasota train car, “Pie Car” imagines the storied circus melodramas its walls would have once housed.

This empathy-inducing documentary brings together three sets of individuals. They each have profoundly personal reasons for existing on different sides of the ideological aisles of three hot-button issues: guns, abortion, and immigration. They aren’t brought together to change one another’s minds though, but rather… to listen.