Cinema For All – Films showing in Autumn

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, director Chinonye Chukwu’s breakout film, Clemency, features a powerful performance from Alfre Woodard as Bernadine, a tough prison officer, forms an unlikely bond with Anthony, a prisoner, who maintains his innocence till the day of his execution.

This debut feature from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler won the Future Prize when in debuted at Cannes in 2013, and tells the real life story of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old Bay Area resident, who crosses paths with friends, enemies, family, and strangers on the last day of 2008.

Working from the text of acclaimed author James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, Remember This House, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States. Exploring the history of racism in America through Baldwin’s recollections of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

From the director of last years Oscar nominated King Richard, Reinaldo Marcus Green, comes this Sundance Award-winning portrait of race, family and consequence in which the tight-knit community of Bed-Stuy is pushed to the brink after the death of a black man at the hands of police.

Moonlight

Often cited as one of the best films of its decade, Moonlight was the first LGBTQ film with an all-black cast to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Told across three chapters, following the life of Chiron, a young gay man who must navigate race, class and the pains and joys of first love in a journey of self-discovery.

Rebel Dread

Rebel Dread is the story of Don Letts, a first-generation British-born Black filmmaker, DJ, musician, and cultural commentator. The film frames Don’s story with the 1968 Enoch Powell ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and the 2018 ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy, and follows how Letts injected Afro-Caribbean music into the early punk scene and shot over 300 music videos including for Public Image Ltd. and Bob Marley.