This Black History Month we'll be sharing stories of black trailblazers, leaders, artists, and changemakers who have shaped history.
Documentaries can act as tools to help us better understand, learn and celebrate black stories. Here are a selection of documentaries to add to your watchlist.
LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING
Little Richard: I Am Everything tells the story of the black queer origins of rock n’ roll, exploding the whitewashed canon of American pop music to reveal the innovator – the originator– Richard Penniman. Through a wealth of archive and performance that brings us into Richard’s complicated inner world, the film unspools the icon’s life story with all its switchbacks and contradictions. In interviews with family, musicians, and cutting-edge black and queer scholars, the film reveals how Richard created an art form for ultimate self-expression, yet what he gave to the world he was never able to give to himself. Throughout his life, Richard careened like a shiny cracked pinball between God, sex and rock n’ roll. The world tried to put him in a box, but Richard was an omni being who contained multitudes – he was unabashedly everything.
MLK/FBI
MLK/FBI is the first film to uncover the extent of the FBI’s surveillance and harassment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on newly discovered and declassified files, utilizing a trove of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and unsealed by the National Archives, as well as revelatory restored footage, the documentary explores the government’s history of targeting Black activists, and the contested meaning behind some of our most cherished ideals. Featuring interviews with key cultural figures including former FBI Director James Comey and directed by Emmy® Award-winner and Oscar®-nominee Sam Pollard, MLK/FBI tells this astonishing and tragic story with searing relevance to our current moment.
THE HARD STOP
The Hard Stop is an intimate documentary revealing the story, away from all press coverage, of Mark Duggan’s friends and family following his death. He was shot and killed in a ‘Hard Stop’ police procedure in 2011, sparking the most violent riots in British history. For 28 months, director George Amponsah (The Fighting Spirit) filmed around Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, where Duggan grew up, capturing his family’s distress and focusing on two of his best friends, Marcus Knox and Kurtis Henville. We follow the men closely as they attempt to get on with their lives, look for a job, talk about the discrimination they experience on a daily basis and the impact Duggan’s death has had on the community. Duggan is present throughout, in peoples’ testimonies and news broadcasts. What emerges is a profoundly humane, thought-provoking and topical testament, which gives a voice to people who are rarely heard.
Source: Metrodome Film
the Stuart hall project
Stuart Hall emigrated from Jamaica to the UK in 1951 to take up a place at Oxford University, and became a founding figure of cultural studies with a resounding and ongoing influence on British intellectual life. Comprised of archive footage and set to the music of Miles Davis, this documentary by the director of The Nine Muses matches the agility of its subject, playing on memory, identity and the changing landscape of the late 20th century.
Source: BFI Player
BLACK MOTHER
Part film, part baptism, in Black Mother director Khalik Allah brings us on a spiritual exploration through Jamaica. Soaking up its bustling metropolises and tranquil countryside, Allah introduces us to a succession of vividly rendered souls who call this island home. Their candid testimonies create a polyphonic symphony, set against a visual prayer of indelible portraiture. Immersed into the sacred, the profane, and everything in-between, Black Mother channels rebellion and reverence into a deeply personal ode informed by Jamaica’s turbulent history but existing in the urgent present.
KOKOMO CITY
Directed by two-time Grammy nominee D. Smith, Kokomo City takes up a seemingly simple mantle — to present the stories of four Black transgender sex workers in New York and Georgia. Shot in striking black and white, the boldness of the facts of these women’s lives and the earthquaking frankness they share complicate this enterprise, colliding the everyday with cutting social commentary and the excavation of long-dormant truths. Accessible for any audience, unfiltered, unabashed, and unapologetic, Smith and her subjects smash the trendy standard for authenticity, offering a refreshing rawness and vulnerability unconcerned with purity and politeness.
UPRISING
In the early hours of 18 January 1981, in a house in south London, a birthday party ended in a fire. Thirteen young black British people died. The fire and its aftermath would ignite an uprising by the black British community. This film tells the stories of the young people who were at the party and the events that led up to it.
Source: BBC IPlayer