Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) remains one of the most spiritually rich and visually poetic films in American cinema. Set in 1902 among the Gullah community on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, the film follows the Peazant family as Read More …
“Throw your lovin’ arms around me So my enemies cannot harm me Oh Lord, Oh Lord, I’m in your hand, in your hand”* Go back to that church in Mississippi. See its open faces. Hear its voices of peace. Touch its simple walls. Taste the Read More …
Everything in Sinners has a twin. The protagonists, Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), are twin brothers. While the characters may not resemble Cain and Abel in spirit, their fates are similar; one brother dies and the other is cursed to be Read More …
What makes Solomon Northrup a painfully effective avatar through which the modern viewer can experience slavery is that, like almost all of us, he was not born into it. A free man of color living in New York, he takes a job as a musician Read More …
Dee Rees’s Mudbound plants itself firmly in Mississippi circa WWII, winding its way through the lives of a black family with deep, world-weary roots as they live and work as sharecroppers on the farm of a (once affluent) white family. Nakedly ambitious, Mudbound is a rural epic, chronicling the Read More …
“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper. The storm clouds did not release a ‘gentle rain from heaven,’ but a whirlwind, which has not yet spent its force or attained its full momentum.” – Martin Luther Read More …