Flirting with the conventions of blaxploitation and the horror cinema, Bill Gunn's revolutionary independent film Ganja and Hess is a highly stylized and utterly original treatise on sex, religion, and African American identity. Duane Jones (Night of the living dead) stars as anthropologist Hess Green, who is stabbed with an ancient ceremonial dagger by his unstable assistant (director Bill Gunn), endowing him with the blessing of immortality, and...

This spoof from the Wayans Brothers parodies the ultra-popular novel/film series Fifty Shades of Grey.

Based on the true story of Solomon Northup. It is 1841, and Northup, an accomplished, free citizen of New York, is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Stripped of his identity and deprived of all dignity, Northup is ultimately purchased by ruthless plantation owner Edwin Epps and must find the strength within to survive. Filled with powerful performances by an astonishing cast including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbener, Benedict Cumberbatch, Brad...

The gripping story is told through four generations, from the capture of Kunta Kinte in Africa to his transport to Colonial America in brutal conditions through successive generations fighting to win their freedom in the Civil war. Based on Alex Haley₂s best-selling novel which has resonated with millions of Americans, it reveals powerful, universal truths about the resilience of the human spirit.

It is 1943 and the Germans are winning the Second World War as the U.S. suffers huge losses on the ground and in the air. Four newly recruited pilots are united by a desire to serve their country, at a time when black flyers are not welcomed in the Air Force. Now, they must undertake the riskiest mission of their lives to prove to America that courage knows no color.

Ishmael Reed's career as one of our great playwrights has long been eclipsed by his other work. Here published for the first time, Reed's plays follow the ancient tradition of using the theater as a forum in which the official versions of our history can be critiqued. Dealing with subjects that mainstream theatergoers might find disturbing--homelessness, the arbitrary entrapment of a black politician, the excesses of the radical feminist movement,...

August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won...

Hank and Leticia inhabit stark, queasy realities of the contemporary South, he as a death row corrections officer and she as the soon-to-be widow of an inmate whose execution Hank helps conduct. In the aftermath of the execution, both lose their children to tragic deaths and they form an unlikely bond.

Killer of sheep: An African-American slaughterhouse worker searches for tiny moments of beauty in his predominantly bleak life. My brother's wedding: A young African-American man navigates his conflicting obligations while trying to figure out what he really wants in life.