2016 is the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party and the buzz surrounding this historic milestone is electrifying. This festival will honor both the legacy of the BPP and "Remember our Political Prisoners."  

Friday, September 23rd, 7:00pm

Free Angela and All Political Prisoners

Shola Lynch, 2013, 102 min.

This documentary, chronicling the life of young activist and scholar Angela Davis, and her implication in a botched kidnapping that ended in a shoot-out, four dead, and her name on the FBI's 10 most wanted list, vividly returns us to the fraught period immediately after the official Civil Rights Movement had crested, when a new brand of repressive conservatism was sweeping the nation. Through interviews with the irrepressible Davis herself, as well as members of her family, her lawyers, and her many intellectual contemporaries, Lynch stitches together a revealing portrait of this important thinker, one of the first to successfully articulate the underlying continuity between the modern prison system and America's legacy of slavery.

Q&A with director Shola Lynch.

Saturday, September 24th, 4:00pm

41st and Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers

Gregory Everett, 2010, 120 min.

The first part in a documentary series following the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party from its Black Power beginnings through to its tragic demise, this film contains interviews with former Black Panther Party members along with archival footage detailing the history of racism in Los Angeles, including the Watt’s uprising from the perspective of the participants who engaged with the LAPD. 41st & Central also gives the viewer an eyewitness account of Bunchy and John Huggins's murders at UCLA in 1968.

Saturday, September 24th, 7:00pm

George Jackson: Releasing the Dragon Mixtape

Bashi Rose & Jared Ball, 2015, 63 min.

Composed of a collage of archival footage, recorded interviews, and musical and spoken word performances by a range of artists from from jazz drummer Billy Kilson to Tim Hicks of the Cornel West Theory and poet Umar bin Hassan, this tribute to George Jackson weaves a tapestry of black activist art spanning three generations.

Wednesday, September 28th, 7:30pm  

The Harlem Comedy Festival

The first week-long comedy festival in Harlem celebrating people of color in comedy!

Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic

Marina Zenovich, 2013, 90 min

Dave Chappelle, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, Bob Newhart and others offer insight into the mind of Richard Pryor in filmmaker Marina Zenovich's examination of the late comic's life and career.

Moms Mabley: I Got Something to Tell You

Whoopi Goldberg, 2013, 72 min

Featuring recently unearthed photographs, rediscovered performance footage and the words of entertainers and historians, the film includes interviews with Eddie Murphy, Joan Rivers, Sidney Poitier, Kathy Griffin, Harry Belafonte, Bill Cosby, Quincy Jones, Arsenio Hall, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, who emphasize how Mabley paved the way for female comedians and performers everywhere in provocative stand-up routines that challenged racism, sexism and ageism.

Friday, September 30th, 7:00pm

Tupac Vs.

Ken Peters, 2004, 90 min.

The basis of this 2004 documentary about the life and death of Tupac Shakur (1971-1996) is a rarely-seen 1995 video interview conducted at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York, shortly before the rapper's release and fateful decision to sign with Suge Knight's Death Row Records. Here, we find the young icon at relative ease, even jovial and reflective, as he discusses his growing sense of distance from the Thug Life persona he had cultivated as an artist, and his desire to move to a higher plane of personal and political consciousness. Tupac Vs. dwells in the mournful space between this hopeful moment and the tragic events that followed in the life of this son of a Black Panther, Afeni Shakur, (1947-2016). September 13th, 2016 marks the 20th anniversary of Tupac's death.