Directed by Billy Woodberry
6 Episodes
One of the leading figures of the LA Rebellion—the new wave of Black American independent cinema that emerged from UCLA’s film school in the 1970s and ’80s—Billy Woodberry created one of the movement’s defining works with his neorealist masterpiece BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, an aching portrait of an ordinary family buckling under marital and economic pressures. Since then, Woodberry has forged his own distinctive brand of archival documentary filmmaking in searching, politically trenchant works like AND WHEN I DIE, I WON’T STAY DEAD and his latest, MÁRIO, a portrait of the Pan-African thinker and activist Mário Pinto de Andrade, founder of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
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1:25:43Episode 1Bless Their Little Hearts
Episode 1
Directed by Billy Woodberry • 1984 • United States
Starring Nate Hardman, Kaycee Moore, Angela BurnettScripted and shot by Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry’s slice-of-life revelation is a key masterpiece of the LA Rebellion, the black independent-cinema renaissance that emerged from UCLA’s film...
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1:29:47Episode 2And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead
Episode 2
Directed by Billy Woodberry • 2015 • United States
Legendary Beat visionary Bob Kaufman considered poetry a key to human survival, an idea made all the more legitimate by the longevity it is granted: the things he saw, heard, tasted, felt, and, most of all, thought were preserved in his work. Em...
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Mário
Episode 3
Directed by Billy Woodberry • 2024 • France, Portugal
Director Billy Woodberry examines the life and legacy of Mário Pinto de Andrade, a Pan-African thinker, activist, and founder of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) whose work was critical to the African liberation movem...
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12:55Episode 4The Pocketbook
Episode 4
Directed by Billy Woodberry • 1980 • United States
Starring Ray Cherry, David Jenkins, Ella “Simi” NelsonAdapted from Langston Hughes’s classic short story “Thank You, Ma’am,” Billy Woodberry’s UCLA student film follows a young man reflecting on his life after a robbery gone wrong.
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10:34Episode 5Marseille après la guerre
Episode 5
Directed by Billy Woodberry • 2005 • United States
Through striking black-and-white photos, director Billy Woodberry creates a poetic portrait of the dockworkers who struggled together in Marseille after World War II and reflects on the political awakening of one of them—future “father of Africa...
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43:16Episode 6A Story from Africa
Episode 6
Directed by Billy Woodberry • 2019 • Portugal, United States
In this powerful archival documentary, director Billy Woodberry draws from rare early-twentieth-century photographs to shed light on the tragic history of the Portuguese colonization of Angola.
