Charles Burnett Movies

John is a man of many talents, including one forbidden skill: he can read. When he teaches a young slave girl named Sarny to read and write, she...

Jason Ross is an 11-year-old boy whose love for baseball exceeds his talent for the game. When cut from his little league team, Jason's undefeatable...

A Little League baseball game becomes the unlikely context for this lyrical drama about memory and loss, told from the perspective of a...

A woman in a Hollywood dubbing studio struggles with race and preconceptions. The short film depicts the life of an African American woman passing...

Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation is a 2007 epic film on the Namibian independence struggle against South African occupation as seen through the...

What does it mean to be Black in America in the 21st century? The recently formed Black American film group TNEG™ has set out to elucidate this...

An African American woman living away from her family in Los Angeles yearns to be recognized for more than her physical attributes. In cultivating...

An enigmatic drifter from the South comes to visit an old acquaintance who now lives in South-Central LA.

Sa-I-Gu, literally translated in Korean as April 29, is the day of the 1992 Los Angeles riots or uprising. Three months after the events, the...

A single mother ekes out a living from welfare check to welfare check, struggling to provide for her daughter.

This video work intermingles fiction with actuality in a poignant confrontation with homelessness.

An improvised late '60s short-subject student film, and debut movie of Charles Burnett, done in the neo-realist, documentary film style. A...

In 1831, Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in the United States that resulted in the murder of local slave owners and their families, the eventual...

After wrongly doing time in prison for murder, a man seeks revenge on a racist law enforcement system and the detective who framed him.

A teenage boy leaves a moment of boredom while his father works on his old car, and the mother wishes to go out for a stroll around the block. One...

This critically acclaimed 1973 short is about an aristocratic white farming family who has a horse that is being put away, by the father of a young...

Filmmaker Robert Townsend executive-produced the following fifty-six-minute program for Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series in 2018. In it,...

Filmmaker Thomas Penick explores race, gender and violence in this provocative, disturbing drama set on a hot, summer day in 1969. When a woman...