Industry

In 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates, a native of Baltimore wrote his bestselling non-fiction book “Between the World and Me” as a letter to his then 15-year-old son. In it, he speaks of the emotions and realities of being Black in America.

The American Cinematheque in Los Angeles hosted a conversation about Barry Jenkins’ new 10-part anthology series The Underground Railroad with female lead Thuso Mbedu, cinematographer James Laxton, editor Joi McMillan, costume designer Caroline Eselin, hairstylist Lawrence Davis and makeup artist Doniella Davy. Historically, the Underground Railroad was a network of both, Black and White people who helped enslaved escapees from plantations in the South make their way north by offering transportation, protection, and shelter.

Five decades after it was made, Sunday Bloody Sunday is just as poignant and intelligent as it was back in 1971, when initially released. John Schlesinger’s mature tale was nominated for major Oscars and won the Golden Globe for Best English-Speaking Foreign Film (a category since discontinued), earning a Best Actor nomination for Peter Finch.

While Hollywood made thousands of films from the 1920s to the 1960s, the African film industry can only be traced back to the decolonization period of the continent. What film production existed under foreign rule was stereotyped, and merely used Africa as an “exotic” background for Western cinema.

On April 3, 2016, at 2 pm EST, the world was rocked by the publication of the Panama Papers investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. In the biggest collaboration of its kind, 376 journalists from 107 media companies in 80 countries sifted through, investigated and fact-checked 11.

Chances are anyone studying Korean cinema history today has never watched the silent films made in that country during the mid-1920s and1930. Only a few films stills have survived from this period because of the destruction wrought by Japanese colonial rule, World War II, the Korean War, and the years of repressive control by the military government that affected the Korean film industry.

Kelly Marie Tran, H. E.

Since its founding, Hollywood has adapted to the screen hundreds if not thousands of literary works by white authors, but – with the exception of some anomalies such as Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in 1985 – has largely ignored the work of their Black peers. In the last decade, however, the commercial and critical success of Black movies has opened Hollywood’s mind and wallet to bringing the work of Black literary icons to the screen.

“I may be known as a crude, loudmouth son-of-a-bitch, but I built Columbia. I started it with spit and wire and these fists.

When Netflix decided to release Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods in mid-June last year, after it had missed its premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, which was canceled due to Covid-19, it didn’t expect it to become the center of media attention and a source of political discourse. But neither did it expect the public’s eruptive reaction to the suffocating death of an African American, named George Floyd, at the hands of a White police officer.