On Jan. 5, 1931, Mexican-American students were barred from attending their local elementary school. The parents took the school district to court.
Social & External
Foreign Puzzle is an intimate documentary that captures the journey of an inspiring Mexican American dancer as she communicates the impermanence of life through dance while juggling the roles of a recently divorced parent of a 6-year-old, a choreographer and a primary school teacher amidst intensive treatments for breast cancer.
“In Gaza you have to get there in the evening, in spring, lock yourself in your room and from there listen to the sounds coming in through the open window.... It's 2018. I am 25 years old and a foreign traveler. I meet young Palestinians my age..”
A year in the life of an underdog competitive high school mariachi band in the Texas borderlands.
Can a tree be racist? A few years ago, debate on this issue reached as far as Fox News. The focus was a row of tamarisk trees along a huge golf course in Palm Springs, which screened off the neighborhood of Crossley Tract. This is a historically Black neighborhood, named after its founder Lawrence Crossley, who was one of the first Black residents to settle in the largely white tourist paradise, established on indigenous land over a century ago.
Varosha, the only city on the world without people, the loneliest city... Varosha is a province in Cyprus that is closed with fences and unpopulated since 1974.
In 2007 Mobile, Alabama, Mardi Gras is celebrated... and complicated. Following a cast of characters, parades, and parties across an enduring color line, we see that beneath the surface of pageantry lies something else altogether.
In THE COLOR OF FEAR, eight American men participated in emotionally charged discussions of racism. In this sequel, we hear and see more from those discussions, in which the men talk about about how racism has affected their lives in the United States. We also learn more about the relationships between them, and about their reactions during some of the most intense moments of that discussion.
Never-before-seen testimony is included in this documentary on Emmett Louis Till, who, in 1955, was brutally murdered after he whistled at a white woman.
Trevor Phillips confronts some uncomfortable truths about racial stereotypes, as he asks if attempts to improve equality have led to serious negative consequences.
This coming-of-age story follows three students of El Paso's Bowie High and their search for the American dream, a dream inspired by family, fueled by sports, and complicated by the US/Mexican border.
More than 60,000 of Ernest Cole’s 35mm film negatives were inexplicably discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm, Sweden. Most considered these forever lost, especially the thousands of pictures he shot in the U.S. Told through Cole’s own writings, the stories of those closest to him, and the lens of his uncompromising work, the film is a reintroduction of a pivotal Black artist to a new generation and will unravel the mystery of his missing negatives.
The Cold War and Civil Rights collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and their mixed-race band members, faced a painful dilemma: how could they represent a country that still practiced Jim Crow segregation?
Diversity trainer Lee Mun Wah assembles a diverse group of eight American men to talk about their experience of race relations in the United States. The exchange is sometimes dramatic as they lay bare the pain that racism in the US has caused them.
This feature length documentary tells the story of three Latino wine makers in California's Napa Valley. From their humble beginnings as immigrant laborers working the grape harvests in California, to their now formidable positions as wine makers and wine consultants, they are witnesses to the new era of the American dream. Journey from their homes in Mexico, to immigrants working the fields of Napa, to success in the highly competitive industry of wine making. It is not just the story of immigrants or wine makers, it is a story of the pursuit of a dream.
CORPUS explores the mass adulation and explosive posthumous recognition of Selena Quintanilla, the Tejano rock singer murdered by the president of her fan club in 1995. Pushing beyond the mainstream media's fascination with her violent death, Portillo interviews Selena's family and friends as well as the devoted fans that pilgrimage to Selena's grave in Corpus Christi, Texas, to pay homage to the slain star. Moving and provocative, this humble investigative portrait explores Selena's cultural significance as a pop icon and shines a light on the hopes, fantasies, fears, and realities of young Latinas today.
Marthas is a PBS documentary about an extraordinary rite of passage in Laredo, Texas where teenage Mexican-American girls debut in a grand Colonial Ball dressed as American revolutionaries - a tradition that goes back 114 years.
Rap Dixon was a legendary African American baseball player who played in what were known as the Negro Leagues. This film chronicles his life and baseball accomplishments while exploring how racism and segregation affect how people are remembered in history.
A documentary on the life of Matthew Kennedy, one of the first internationally acclaimed African American concert pianists, and former director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. The film contains footage of interviews with Dr. Kennedy, live performances, radio broadcasts, studio recordings, and interviews with his former students and colleagues. Born in the segregated South in 1921, Matthew Kennedy was known throughout his home state of Georgia as a child-prodigy. At age 12 he attended a concert given by the famous Russian pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff in Macon, Georgia in 1932. Kennedy describes what he remembers of the concert from his perspective in the segregated balcony for “Colored.” He was also the star of his own radio show in the early 1930s. At that time, Kennedy's stage name on radio and in the cinema – where he played the organ to accompany the silent films – was “Sunshine.”
In White Like Me, anti-racist educator Tim Wise explores race and racism in the US through the lens of whiteness and white privilege.
