Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1970 • United States
Director Lionel Rogosin’s fourth feature is a unique oral history that uses song and bittersweet stories to illustrate the difficulties of Black people living in 1970s America. The extraordinary cast—including Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, attorney and feminist activist Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, musicians Jim Collier, Wende Smith, Larry Johnson, and Reverend Gary Davis—tell stories of heartbreak and despair while their songs blow the roof off the rafters. A deeply humanist film, BLACK ROOTS combines tales of oppression with gorgeous images of the faces of Black men, women, and children.
Up Next in Lionel Rogosin's Dangerous Docufictions
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Black Fantasy
Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1972 • United States
An uncompromising, often discomfitingly frank look at the complexities of interracial relationships in America, this rarely seen documentary unfolds from the perspective of Jim Collier, a Black musician married to a white woman, as he expounds, w...
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How Do You Like Them Bananas?
Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1966 • United States
Improvised slapstick fun ensues in the meeting between a banker and a pompous minister in this comedic short.
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Woodcutters of the Deep South
Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1973 • United States
In the lush backwoods of Mississippi and Alabama, history is being made. Poor Black and white working people are trying to overcome the forces of racism to organize into cooperative associations and dispel the bonds of their economic captors—the ...
