George Washington Carver

Color footage of inventor George Washington Carver at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Dr. Carver is filmed at his apartment, office, laboratory, and garden.

Les Blank brings us the life and work of self-taught, visual artist Butch Anthony, who hails from the small town of Seale in Southeastern Alabama. Butch is a rare individual with a unique ability to see the potential in objects that others take for granted. He is considered one of the top naïve artists in Alabama, and, as his artwork is shown in museums around the country, he is becoming a national treasure. Blank’s camera follows Butch to various folk art festivals around the South, visiting the friends and artists who inspired him to create art. Blank also observes Butch’s life in Alabama’s rural landscape. From ‘coon hunting to “calling up” alligators and digging up fossils, Butch Anthony shows us a South not known to many outsiders.

Civil Rights Movement activist, TSSAA Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, swim coach, teacher, musical director, father, grandfather, and friend to many, Coach Sylvester Ford Sr. was known by many as “Big Time.” The nickname was given to him as a kid for his height, but “Big Time” showed time and time again why his nickname was about way more than his looks– it’s also because of how he showed up big for his community. Hometown Feature Audience Award winner at Indie Memphis 2024, Big Time chronicles the life of legendary Memphis basketball coach, Sylvester Ford Sr., while inspiring us all to live “big time” lives along the way.

A look at the Black revolution in 1970s cinema, from genre films to social realism, from the making of new superstars to the craft of rising auteurs.

Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Common in Jim Crow South, few women spoke up in fear for their lives. Not Recy Taylor, who bravely identified her rapists. The NAACP sent its chief rape investigator Rosa Parks, who rallied support and triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice. The film exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks’ intimate role in Recy Taylor’s story.

Incarcerated men defy the odds to expose a cover-up in one of America’s deadliest prison systems.

Traces the life of Booker T. Washington, ex-slave, author, educator, and political leader, focusing on his stewardship of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Uses historic photographs, re-created vignettes, and interviews with contemporaries such as W.E.B. DuBois to present Washington's complex personality and his influence on southern life after the Civil War. Also examines his controversial policies of Black economic self-reliance and political accommodation

Since August 2024, in Martinique, a popular protest movement against the high cost of living has been reemerging under the leadership of the RPPRAC (Rassemblement Pour La Protection Des Peuples Et Des Ressources Afro-Caribéens – Gathering for the Protection of Afro-Caribbean Peoples and Resources). On the island, food prices are on average 54% higher than in mainland France.*  Through various cultural figures, the people of Martinique are expressing their anger and seeking concrete solutions.  *Source: Kiprix, Price comparison between supermarkets in the French overseas territories and mainland France.

Documents the race riot of 1921 and the destruction of the African-American community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. With testimony by eyewitnesses and background accounts by historians.