Brick by Brick: A Civil Rights Story (2007)

Racist Trees

Can a tree be racist? A few years ago, debate on this issue reached as far as Fox News. The focus was a row of tamarisk trees along a huge golf course in Palm Springs, which screened off the neighborhood of Crossley Tract. This is a historically Black neighborhood, named after its founder Lawrence Crossley, who was one of the first Black residents to settle in the largely white tourist paradise, established on indigenous land over a century ago.

Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992

An in-depth look at the culture of Los Angeles in the ten years leading up to the 1992 uprising that erupted after the verdict of police officers cleared of beating Rodney King.

Noble Sissle's Syncopated Ragtime

Combining footage unseen since WWI with original scores from the era, this film tells the story of Noble Sissle's incredible journey that spans "The Harlem Hellfighters" of World War I, Broadway Theatre, the Civil Rights movement, and decades of Black cultural development.

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution

Down the road from Woodstock in the early 1970s, a revolution blossomed in a ramshackle summer camp for disabled teenagers, transforming their young lives and igniting a landmark movement.

Coded Bias

Exploring the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini's startling discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact us all.

Steal This Film

Steal This Film focuses on Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, prominent members of the Swedish filesharing community. The makers claimed that 'Old Media' documentary crews couldn't understand the internet culture that filesharers took part in, and that they saw peer-to-peer organization as a threat to their livelihoods. Because of that, they were determined to accurately represent the filesharing community from within. Notably, Steal This Film was released and distributed, free of charge, through the same filesharing networks that the film documents.

The Order of Myths

In 2007 Mobile, Alabama, Mardi Gras is celebrated... and complicated. Following a cast of characters, parades, and parties across an enduring color line, we see that beneath the surface of pageantry lies something else altogether.

Ferguson Rises

Before George Floyd, before Breonna Taylor, before America knew about Black Lives Matter, there was Michael Brown, Jr. On August 9th, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed Brown. The community reacted in protest, anger, frustration, and fear. Six years later, a new story emerges - one filled with hope, love, and beauty.

Reggie

One of sport’s first and most influential megastars, beloved baseball icon and 5-time World Series champion Reggie Jackson contemplates his legacy as a trailblazing Black athlete fighting for dignity, respect, and a seat at the table in this intimate and revealing documentary exploring his life and barrier-busting career.

Inquiry: The Great British Housing Disaster

David Jones investigates how 1960s council housing came to be built so poorly that thousands later needed to be demolished.

The Musicians' Green Book: An Enduring Legacy

Stories and music of Black artists who relied on an underground travel guide to navigate the injustices of racial segregation while on the road. The Negro Travelers’ Green Book was a directory of lodgings, restaurants, and entertainment venues where African Americans were welcomed. Features performances and interviews with vocalists, musicians, activists, historians, and others.

The Times of Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world.

Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart

On March 11, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s 'A Raisin in the Sun' opened on Broadway and changed the face of American theater forever. As the first-ever black woman to author a play performed on Broadway, she did not shy away from richly drawn characters and unprecedented subject matter. The play attracted record crowds and earned the coveted top prize from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. While the play is seen as a groundbreaking work of art, the timely story of Hansberry’s life is far less known.

Salute

The black power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico Olympics was an iconic moment in the US civil rights struggle. Far less known is the part in that episode in history played by Peter Norman, the white Australian on the podium who had run second — and the price paid afterward by all three athletes.

King in the Wilderness

A chronicle of the final chapters of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, revealing a conflicted leader who faced an onslaught of criticism from both sides of the political spectrum.

Before Stonewall

New York City's Stonewall Inn is regarded by many as the site of gay and lesbian liberation since it was at this bar that drag queens fought back against police June 27-28, 1969. This documentary uses extensive archival film, movie clips and personal recollections to construct an audiovisual history of the gay community before the Stonewall riots.

Betrayed: Surviving an American Concentration Camp

The story of the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans and the loss of civil rights.

The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till

Never-before-seen testimony is included in this documentary on Emmett Louis Till, who, in 1955, was brutally murdered after he whistled at a white woman.

Seeing Allred

Gloria Allred overcame trauma and personal setbacks to become one of the nation’s most famous women’s rights attorneys. Now the feminist firebrand takes on two of the biggest adversaries of her career, Bill Cosby and Donald Trump, as sexual violence allegations grip the nation and keep her in the spotlight.

Controlling Britney Spears

Britney Spears has said that her conservatorship had become “an oppressive and controlling tool against her”. This New York Times investigation reveals much of how it worked, including an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored every move she made.

The Gospel of Eureka

Faith, love and civil rights collide on voting day in a small Southern town that hosts a famous performance of the last days of Christ and an infamous gospel drag show.

Nightfighters: The True Story Of The 332nd Fighter Group--The Tuskegee Airmen

The story of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African American pilots who saw combat during the Second World War. The 332nd Fighter Group stands apart from any other air force fighter groups in the Second World War: all personnel, from pilots to ground crew to surgeons, were black. They confounded expectations and prejudices existing in America in the thirties and forties about the abilities of black Americans. They excelled as pilots and became a crack unit, showing great courage and skill and achieving where other fighter groups had failed. Despite this, they were segregated on the ground and in the air from the white flyers whose lives they protected. (Alexander Street)

News Without A Newsroom

As local newsrooms vanish, "News Without a Newsroom" explores journalism's uncertain future in the digital age. Through powerful stories and expert insights, the film examines the collapse of traditional media, the rise of misinformation, and the fight to preserve truth, trust and accountability in an era of disruption.

Sidney Poitier - Der Mann, der Hollywood veränderte

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Klansville U.S.A.

Investigates the reasons North Carolina, long seen as the most progressive state in the South, became home to the largest Klan organization in the country, with more members than all the other Southern states combined, during the 1960s.

Mavis!

A look at the life and music of legendary singer and civil rights activist, Mavis Staples.

1964

1964 was the year the Beatles came to America, Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, and three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. It was the year when Berkeley students rose up in protest, African Americans fought back against injustice in Harlem, and Barry Goldwater’s conservative revolution took over the Republican Party. In myriad ways, 1964 was the year when Americans faced choices: between the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson or Barry Goldwater’s grassroots conservatism, between support for the civil rights movement or opposition to it, between an embrace of the emerging counterculture or a defense of traditional values.

Denying Brazil

A documentary film about the taboos, stereotypes, and struggles of black actors in Brazilian television "soaps". Based on his own memories and on a sturdy body of research evidence, the director analyses race relations in Brazilian soap operas, calling attention to their likely influence on Brazilian African-Americans' identity-forming processes.

Warrior Women

Through the figure of Lakota activist and community organizer Madonna Thunder Hawk, this inspiring film traces the untold story of countless Native American women struggling for their people's civil rights. Spanning several decades, Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle's documentary charts Thunder Hawk's lifelong commitment, from her early involvement in the American Indian Movement (AIM), to her pivotal role in the founding of Women of All Red Nations, to her heartening presence at Standing Rock alongside thousands protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. She passed her dedication and hunger for change to her daughter Marcy, even if that often meant feeling like comrades-in-arms more than mother and child. Through rare archival material—including amazing footage of AIM's occupation of Wounded Knee—and an Indigenous style of circular storytelling, Warrior Women rekindles the memories and legacy of the Red Power movement's matriarchs.

Through the Banks of the Red Cedar

In 1963 at Michigan State University, Head Coach Duffy Daugherty chose 23 black men to play on the college team. From this move came legends Gene Washington, Bubba Smith, George Webster and Clinton Jones. Director Maya Washington, Gene Washington’s daughter, charts the legacy of her father’s career and influence, along with the impact the events of 1963 have shown in the present day.

The Jazz Ambassadors

The Cold War and Civil Rights collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and their mixed-race band members, faced a painful dilemma: how could they represent a country that still practiced Jim Crow segregation?

Things We Won't Say About Race That Are True

Trevor Phillips confronts some uncomfortable truths about racial stereotypes, as he asks if attempts to improve equality have led to serious negative consequences.

Martin Luther King: More Than One Dream

The real dream of the American pastor Martin Luther King was never limited to civil rights. He hoped for a just America, where poverty would no longer have a place. Social equality was for him the only guarantee of a true emancipation. During the last four years of his life, he mobilized all his energy to realize this "other dream". But there were many obstacles: he was scorned by white, racist America, abandoned by the political class, but also by some of his own people, who decided to turn their backs on the principle of non-violence.

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

During the same summer as Woodstock, over 300,000 people attended the Harlem Cultural Festival, celebrating African American music and culture, and promoting Black pride and unity. The footage from the festival sat in a basement, unseen for over 50 years, keeping this incredible event in America's history lost — until now.

Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment

During a two-day period before and after the University of Alabama integration crisis, the film uses five camera crews to follow President John F. Kennedy, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, Alabama governor George Wallace, deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach and the students Vivian Malone and James Hood. As Wallace has promised to personally block the two black students from enrolling in the university, the JFK administration discusses the best way to react to it, without rousing the crowd or making Wallace a martyr for the segregationist cause. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1999.