Today marks the end of our two-month tribute to essential, underrated, and flat-out extraordinary films helmed by Black women directors. Here are the final seven selections:
🌟 The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996): Zesty, uncompromising proof that there's no one right way to revisit the past on film. Dunye’s meta-comedy evinces the multitudinous humanity that her character seeks in her cathectic search for the black queer women who came before her.
🌟 The Weekend (Stella Meghie, 2018): Sasheer Zamata excels as a stunted comic entangled in a romantic roundelay with her ex, his girlfriend, and an alluring stranger during a rustic getaway. Meghie catches some of the languid, layered color of Kathleen Collins in this jazzy comedy.
🌟 Whose Streets? (Sabaah Folayan, 2017): An essential chronicle of the activists who have made bravery their life’s work in the fight against police brutality. Folayan’s film is as true as the hearts that beat inside these fighters and as tireless as the feet that march for change.
🌟 Women with Eyes Open (Anne-Laure Folly, 1994): The observant images and didactic interviews of Folly’s West African expedition all attest to the societal ills and traditions working to keep women inferior but also the lionhearted iconoclasts who are combatting such subordination.
🌟 Your Children Come Back to You (Alile Sharon Larkin, 1979): A girl comes face to face with the oppressive realities of poverty in one of the most haunting and heartrending films of the L.A. Rebellion movement. Larkin blends hard-hitting social critique with pure cinematic poetry.
🌟 Zora is My Name! (Neema Barnette, 1990): Co-writer Ruby Dee and Lynn Whitfield lead a sterling ensemble in a dazzling tapestry of speech, song, movement, and folklore that proudly celebrates the life and ingenuity of Zora Neale Hurston, whose voice was a vessel for the voiceless.
🌟 Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage (Zora Neale Hurston, 1928): A survey of Southern workers and the communities that safeguard them. Hurston sings their songs and records their routines with eager inquisitiveness, her feet planted in the same earth in which they labor and live.
Check out the entire list in a more accessible online form with links and information about where to watch these films.
We hope you enjoyed this extended look at these stunning films as much as we enjoyed saluting them. Seek them out and continue to support Black artistry, past and present. We encourage you to keep digging into a prodigious history of which this guide has only scraped the surface.
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
