Robin D.G. Kelley

Jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams was a genius ahead of her time. From child prodigy to "Boogie-Woogie Queen" to groundbreaking composer to mentoring some of the greatest musicians of all time, she never ceased to astound those who heard her play. But for a Black woman in the early 1900s, life as a star did not come easy.

A sequel to the 1988 award winning documentary, "Slaying the Dragon," this film looks at the past 25 years of representation of Asian and Asian American women in U.S. visual media -- from blockbuster films and network television to Asian American cinema and YouTube -- to explore what's changed, what's been recycled, and what we can hope for in the future.

The film explores the history of the word throughout its inception to present day. Woven into the narrative are poetry, music, and commentary from celebrities about their personal experiences with the word and their viewpoints. Each perspective is unique, as is each experience... some are much more comfortable with the word than others.

The Black Audio Film Collective’s seventh film envisioned the death and life of the African American revolutionary as a seven part study in iconography as narrated by novelist Toni Cade Bambara and actor Giancarlo Espesito. The stylized tableaux vivants that memorialise Malcolm’s life referenced the early 20th century funeral photography of James Van der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and the elemental static cinematography of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

Feature-length, crowd-funded documentary that interweaves never-before-seen footage of C.L.R. James, together with personal contributions from those who knew him, and historical and political analysis from leading scholars of his work. The film grapples with issues from colonialism to cricket, from slavery to Shakespeare, from Marxism to the movies and from reading to revolution.