Films that shed light on the African American struggle for freedom – San Francisco Chronicle

Actor Jamie Foxx energizes the crowd during a kneel-in protest at S.F. City Hall on Monday, June 1. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

Whether we want to be or not, right now, were all part of a historic tidal wave bigger than each of us. In the current COVID era, when you might not be able to be out on the front lines taking a stand against police brutality, you might want to see what you can do from home. One answer: Watch as many films by, about and for black lives as you can.

Many people are sharing reading lists, stories and seconds-long protest videos but dont forget the crucial role that feature films have played in the past 100 years as testament, as education, as a builder of values of love and solidarity and struggle. Recent big-screen releases available for streaming include Oakland-born director Ryan Cooglers first feature film, Fruitvale Station, starring Michael B. Jordan as 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was fatally shot by a BART police officer in 2009, and Just Mercy, starring Jordan opposite Jamie Foxx as wrongfully convicted death row inmate Walter McMillian.

Here are several other options for movies to watch to better understand the newest chapter of the African American freedom struggle:

Probably the most energetic, brassy and mercilessly funny satire to make a splash in the mainstream in quite a while, Boots Riley (born to a family of Chicago social justice organizers who moved to Oakland) holds no quarter. His targets are multifaceted: telemarketers, labor strikes, Bay Area big tech, leftists (white and black) who talk a good talk but never walk it, the white voice that guarantees success even if the speaker is hopelessly mediocre, and the instant meme that people share without serious critical reflection. Its a film that would have left Richard Pryor, Frank Tashlin and Billy Wilder screaming their heads off in the front row at the theater.

Watch it: Streaming on Hulu.

French New Wave filmmaker Agns Varda (Clo From 5 to 7, Le Bonheur) was one of her generations premium documentarians. Here, Varda follows an Oakland protest against the imprisonment of Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party. This nonfiction short is one of her typically remarkable glimpses at the mood of a powerful political moment, 1968, a year thats back with us today with a vengeance.

For supplementary viewing on the Panthers and their legacy, you might want to check out Howard Alk and Mike Grays The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971; rent or buy on Amazon) and Stanley Nelson Jr.s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015; stream on PBS through July 4).

Watch it: Streaming on Criterion Channel.

The visionary Kathleen Collins is behind this recently rediscovered 1982 jewel, one of the first fictional features directed by a black woman. We follow a black philosophy professor, played by the luminescent Seret Scott, who feels stifled by her husband, played by the playwright/novelist/director Bill Gunn, while on the search for the ecstasy that she theorizes about in her latest essay. On an impulse that turns out to be her path to self-realization, she agrees to be the leading lady, Frankie, of a film by a young aspiring black director (her leading man, Johnny, is Duane Jones, the star of George A. Romeros 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead).

Collins film is a fluid, devastating study of disintegrating love, as well as a black womans profound meditation on what it means to create ones self again. What should have been a prolific career was cut tragically short in 1988, when Collins died from breast cancer in Manhattan.

Watch it: Streaming on Criterion Channel.

This 10-episode miniseries from Steve James (Hoop Dreams) is one of the most urgent pieces of U.S. nonfiction filmmaking to come out in the past few years a dispatch from the cultural front line, and an American epic on the scale of Robert Altmans Nashville or Frederick Wisemans In Jackson Heights.

James and a crew of directors follow a diverse cross section of kids black, white, Latino, biracial in the suburban Chicago public high school of Oak Park and River Forest. They track each student across the 2015-16 school year, mixing big, set events (homecoming, prom, sporting events, spoken word competitions, graduation) with spontaneous everyday interactions among teachers, students, staff and administrators and the misunderstandings, microaggressions and frustrations that arise as many push for more frank discussions of race and school equity. The conversations are wide-reaching: class, white privilege, black hair, biracial identities, interracial dating, artistic expression.

The driving question at the start of the first episode: Why does Oak Park and River Forest High School seem to function as two separate schools, one black, one white?

James and his team sprawl out to larger, knottier questions: namely, how can teachers overcome the inequities faced by their nonwhite students? How do we handle the discomfort unearthed by honest questions about race? And how are we failing the next generation in our inability to do so? By the end, you feel like youre just getting to know these incredible students and the teachers (Jessica Stovall, now at Stanford University) who run into soul-killing bureaucratic walls trying to reform a disgustingly failed system. It is an exhausting and engrossing experience.

Watch it: Streaming on Amazon Prime, Starz and DirecTV.

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akermans unforgettable 1999 film is about anti-black brutality in the United States. Her jumping-off points are James Baldwins essay Nobody Knows My Name and the 1999 lynching of James Byrd Jr. by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas.

For minutes, Akermans camera tracks the curves of the road where Byrds body was dragged by a pickup truck, which is heightened by her cinematic replication of the sinuous curves of Baldwins sentences. Its a film that has less to do with sensationalizing the murder than giving an accurate, foreigners report of the place where the crime occurred and the atmosphere of the people who come together to mourn yet another lost member of their family.

Deeply painful to watch, Akerman spiritually grapples with Americas countless sins against black flesh, sins whose magnitude she and her inspirations (Baldwin, William Faulkner) have proved time and again to be unable to confront fully.

Watch it: Streaming on Criterion Channel.

Perhaps the definitive film of the black independent film movement known as the L.A. Rebellion, Charles Burnetts 1978 masterpiece focuses on the lower-class, majority-black neighborhood of Watts in South Central Los Angeles during the later 1970s.

We follow a black family led by Stan (Henry G. Sanders), the father who works at a slaughterhouse, his unemployed wife (Kaycee Moore), and their two children, a quiet girl and a raucous boy. The memory of the 1965 Watts rebellion hangs over each scene. The smoke may have dissipated, but the pain has not.

Burnett focuses on a black familys quotidian doldrums in a radical respect for the burden of labor, in all the forms it assumes, that, for the poor, can often seem for nothing. Its a movie crafted out of felt observations rather than abstract, talky, empty projections of what the filmmakers think people should be.

Watch it: Available through Milestone Films.

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Films that shed light on the African American struggle for freedom - San Francisco Chronicle