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Alice Guy, the very first woman filmmaker in the history of cinema, was born in Paris on July 1, 1873, to a Chilean father and a French mother. After the death of her father in 1891, she trained as a typist and stenographer to help support her widowed mother and four siblings.

It is said that ‘an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. ’ In the case of Sherry Lansing, one of the most successful executives in Hollywood history, that tree was her mother, Margot Heimann, who had escaped Nazi Germany at age 17 and settled in the Chicago area.

During the lead-up to the revelatory song “I’m the Greatest Star,” in the 1968 film Funny Girl, Fanny Brice tries to explain her uniqueness. “I’m a bagel on a plate of onion rolls.

Not since the race film genre of movies that started around 1915 and continued till the 1950s was there another movement in cinema history where Black filmmakers made films with all-Black casts and crews primarily for Black audiences till the blaxploitation era of the early 1970s. The similarities in both movements abound.

In 2014, Sergei Loznitsa, one of Ukraine's most prominent filmmakers, directed Maidan, a powerful documentary focusing on the Euromaidan movement of 2013 and 2014 in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Ukraine's capital Kyiv. As is well known, the Euromaidan movement has advocated political freedom, civil and human rights, and closer ties with the West (with or without affiliation with NATO).

Before The Batman enters Uncharted territory next week, Spider-Man hung on to the box office top three. And with that, Tom Holland dominated the charts again, three weeks in a row, with two movies.

Uncharted reigns in its second week in theaters. In fact, this week’s box office seems like a deja vu all the way through sixth place, and there is not much shakeup in the rest of the German top ten, either.

"This is the one place where they can't stop Black people from voting," said three-time Golden Globe nominee and host of the show Anthony Anderson in his opening statements at the 53rd NAACP Image Awards. He also praised Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who on February 25, became the first Black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court.

Colin Farrell, now playing the Penguin in The Batman by Matt Reeves, is a Golden Globe winner (Best Actor for In Bruges, 2008) and a nominee for The Lobster, 2016. In 2004 Farrell was directed by Oliver Stone in Alexander, about the life of the legendary Macedonian King.

The American Civil Rights movement is an enormous topic, at once a vital part of the history of the United States and also tremendously difficult to distill for those who didn’t actually live some portion of it, because of age or a different country of origin. Thankfully, in celebration of Black History Month, Eyes on the Prize, the trenchant, 14-hour, two-part, Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning documentary series created and executive produced by Henry Hampton, is receiving a deserved boost in profile.