Series Site
Film at Lincoln Center presents “L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now,” a series of films both made and inspired by a diverse group of African, Caribbean, and African American filmmakers and video artists from UCLA in the 1970s and ’80s—known collectively as the L.A. Rebellion—that revitalized not only Black cinema but American film culture as a whole.
FLC is proud to present a retrospective program showcasing the vast, vital influence that the L.A. Rebellion and its spiritual descendants have exerted on the cinema of the African diaspora in the decades since the movement’s founding. This series pairs well-known and lesser-kown L.A. Rebellion films with recent works by a vibrant new generation of artists hailing from Africa, its global diaspora, and the U.S., alongside prominent works from the L.A. filmmakers’ African contemporaries, to show how these intergenerational filmmakers share a common aim: to reflect the complexity of Black experiences and reframe how Black communities and lives are portrayed to global audiences.
In 1968, UCLA launched an initiative aimed at increasing the enrollment of Black, Latino, Native American, and Asian film students. Although the program ended in 1973, it had successfully admitted a significant number of students of color, many of whom continued to attract others to UCLA. Notably, the initiative produced a remarkable group of Black filmmakers, including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima, Jamaa Fanaka, Barbara McCullough, Larry Clark, Alile Sharon Larkin, Ben Caldwell, and Zeinabu irene Davis. In the decades that followed, artists from this extraordinary cohort would go on to become internationally renowned as the founding practitioners of a wholly original school of cinematic thought, justly celebrated for the bracing confluence of stark naturalism and unvarnished lyricism in evoking the rhythms and textures of an underrepresented milieu.
Curated by Claire Diao and co-organized by Madeline Whittle.