93 Search results for "black cinema"

By Johnae Strong  A film by Johnaé Strong Some works capture the beauty of Black life.Others hold its tension, its memory, its muscle.This one does all of that—and then breathes into it. Black Things Today, directed by Johnaé Strong, is a cinematic offering rooted in presence, ritual, and return. Told through the lives of three […]

by Donnie Moreland The first time I held a gun, I was afraid. The scenario was all too awkwardly cinematic to not be memorable. It was on a vacation with my mother to my grandparents’ South Carolina home. Sitting in their entertainment room, my grandfather entered with two guns. A magnum revolver and shotgun. He […]

Editor’s Note: June is LGBTQ Pride Month. At BYP, we will be exploring gender, sexuality, transgender issues and queer theory, and we are interested in publishing works that address these topics and the things surrounding them. We want to hear from you! Send us your pitches at info@blackyouthproject.com This essay contains spoilers for Black Mirror […]

This essay contains spoilers for See You Yesterday, Siempre Bruja, Mortal Kombat 11, and Kindred, as well as discussions of sexual violence and anti-Black state violence.    I was eighteen, a freshman in college studying film and visual arts, and deeply interested in the history of both. A film studies professor asked the class one […]

 by Inigo Laguda  This essay contains spoilers for Another Life (2019) and Annihilation (2018) For a writer, I read astonishingly little. I chalk my aversion up to over-inundating myself with books as a boy and filling all my curious voids with grand words and fantastical tales. It’s almost like I nauseatingly engorged myself on literature […]

By Monika Estrella Negra The majority of the Black punks I have talked to were drawn to (or got lost in) the Punk scene in order to escape the rigidity and heteronormative idealism of traditional Black political organizing. This is not to infer that all Black punks identify with far leftist views, nor does it […]

By Donnie Moreland It must’ve been 2015 when I first viewed Debbie Tucker Green’s Second Coming (2014). It’s a film which asks the question, what if the nativity story took place between two working class Black folks already raising a little boy in South London.  It’s a mesmerizing dreamscape of rage and longing, orbited by […]

by Donnie Moreland The first time I held a gun, I was afraid. The scenario was all too awkwardly cinematic to not be memorable. It was on a vacation with my mother to my grandparents’ South Carolina home. Sitting in their entertainment room, my grandfather entered with two guns. A magnum revolver and shotgun. He […]

by Donnie Moreland  Steve McQueen’s Western Deep is a horror film. Though McQueen’s 2002 dual video installation (presented with Carib’s Leap) is, in form, video art, I feel it is possible to understand Western Deep as genre cinema.  An exploration into the TauTona Mine Shaft No.3 of South Africa—also known as Western Deep—it is a […]

by Donnie Moreland Most folk respond to the words, “I have a Master’s degree in film studies” with either, “What can you do with that?” or the more biting, “What’s the point of that?” Funny thing is that for much of my program, I asked the same questions. It’s when films such as Queen and […]

This essay contains spoilers for Set It Off, and discusses sexual exploitation and state violence   “Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I […]

by Khaaliq Crowder As a Black millennial, I sometimes forget about the advantage that folks of my generation have as opposed to our grandparents and older relatives when it comes to media representation. Black people weren’t always in movies, and when we were, our presence was seldom. My grandparents, who grew in the 1930s and […]