Don Amis

Movies

Festival of Mask
Director
Filmmaker Don Amis was one of the very few Black student filmmakers at UCLA (including Carroll Parrott Blue and Denise Bean) working in a documentary mode. In this film, preparations, parade and performances from the Craft and Folk Art Museum’s annual Festival of Mask illustrate L.A.’s diverse racial and ethnic communities (African, Asian, Latin American) expressing themselves through a shared traditional form.
Gidget Meets Hondo
Cinematography
Filmed in response to the LAPD’s shooting of Eulia Love in 1979, Gidget Meets Hondo opens with stills taken by Bernard Nicolas of a demonstration against Love’s killing. Nicolas’ Gidget is a self-absorbed young white woman who remains clueless to the violence erupting around her, ultimately to her own peril. The film asks whether such police brutality would be tolerated if the victim were a middle-class white woman.
African Woman – USA
Camera Operator
A woman from Nigeria seeks work in the United States while her daughter struggles with premonitions and homesickness.
Bellydancing: A History and an Art
Grip
Filmmaker Alicia Dhanifu, who appears in director Jamaa Fanaka’s Emma Mae, constructs a rigorous and beautifully rendered history of belly dancing — its roots and history, forms and meanings. The filmmaker performs this art as well, alone and with other dancers. —Shannon Kelley
Ujamii Uhuru Schule Community Freedom School
Editor
A day-in-the-life portrait of an Afrocentric primary learning academy located in South L.A. that focuses on the virtues of the three Rs—Respect, Righteousness, and Revolution.
Ujamii Uhuru Schule Community Freedom School
Cinematography
A day-in-the-life portrait of an Afrocentric primary learning academy located in South L.A. that focuses on the virtues of the three Rs—Respect, Righteousness, and Revolution.
Ujamii Uhuru Schule Community Freedom School
Producer
A day-in-the-life portrait of an Afrocentric primary learning academy located in South L.A. that focuses on the virtues of the three Rs—Respect, Righteousness, and Revolution.
Ujamii Uhuru Schule Community Freedom School
Director
A day-in-the-life portrait of an Afrocentric primary learning academy located in South L.A. that focuses on the virtues of the three Rs—Respect, Righteousness, and Revolution.