Licensed Streaming Videos:
Cane River
Written, produced, and directed by Emmy Award-winning documentarian, Horace B. Jenkins, and crafted by an entirely African American cast and crew, CANE RIVER is a racially-charged love story in Natchitoches Parish, a "free community of color" in Louisiana. A budding, forbidden romance lays bare the tensions between two black communities, both descended from slaves but of disparate opportunity--the light-skinned, property-owning Creoles and the darker-skinned, more disenfranchised families of the area. This lyrical, visionary film disappeared for decades after Jenkins died suddenly following the film's completion, robbing generations of a talented, vibrant new voice in African American cinema.
My Brother's Wedding
Pierce Mundy works at his parents' South Central dry cleaners with no prospects for the future and his childhood buddies in prison or dead. With his best friend just getting out of jail and his brother busy planning a wedding to a snooty upper-middle-class black woman, Pierce navigates his conflicting obligations while trying to figure out what he really wants in life.
Saint Omer (Access ends November 25, 2025)
Follows Rama, a novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly at the Saint-Omer Criminal Court to use her story to write a modern-day adaptation of the ancient myth of Medea, but things don't go as expected.
Black Girl (Access ends February 4, 2026)
Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century-and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring BLACK GIRL. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot-about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally-into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M'Bissine Thérèse Diop, BLACK GIRL is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement-and one of the essential films of the 1960s.
American Fiction (Access ends March 31, 2025)
A novelist who's fed up with the establishment profiting from Black entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of the hypocrisy and madness he claims to disdain.
Ethnic Notions (Access ends April 10, 2025)
Ethnic notions is Marlon Riggs' Emmy-winning documentary that takes viewers on a disturbing voyage through American history, tracing for the first time the deep-rooted stereotypes which have fueled anti-black prejudice. Through these images we can begin to understand the evolution of racial consciousness in America. These dehumanizing caricatures permeated popular culture from the 1820s to the Civil Rights period and implanted themselves deep in the American psyche. Narration by Esther Rolle and commentary by respected scholars shed light on the origins and devastating consequences of this 150 yearlong parade of bigotry. Ethnic Notions situates each stereotype historically in white society's shifting needs to justify racist oppression from slavery to the present day.
Fences (Access ends March 31, 2025)
Denzel Washington's adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a black garbage collector in 1950s Pittsburgh named Troy Maxson. Bitter about his lot in life, Maxson frequently takes out his frustrations on his loved ones.
Killer of Sheep (Access ends October 24, 2025)
A realistic portrait of a black, urban Los Angeles community. Stan, a slaughterhouse worker, struggles to provide for his family, love his wife, and maintain responsibility to his community. Though his everyday life is filled with setbacks--he struggles with frustration, depression, and the temptation of friends trying to get him involved in their shady dealings-- he perseveres in the hope of better life for himself and his family.
The Blackening (Access ends September 30, 2025)
Seven friends go away for the weekend and end up trapped in a cabin with a killer who has a vendetta. Will their street smarts and knowledge of horror movies help them stay alive? Probably not.
Get Out (Access ends February 28, 2025)
In Universal Pictures' Get Out, a speculative thriller from Blumhouse (producers of The Visit, Insidious series and The Gift) and the mind of Jordan Peele, when a young African-American man visits his white girlfriend's family estate, he becomes ensnared in a more sinister real reason for the invitation.
Do the Right Thing (Access ends June 30, 2025)
Traces the course of a single day on a block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. It's the hottest day of the year, a scorching 24-hour period that will change the lives of its residents forever.
Daughters of the Dust (Access ends February 16, 2026)
At the dawn of the 20th century, a multi-generational family in the Gullah community on the Sea Islands off of South Carolina - former West African slaves who adopted many of their ancestors - Yoruba traditions - struggle to maintain their cultural heritage and folklore while contemplating a migration to the mainland, even further from their roots. The first wide release by a black female filmmaker, Daughters of the Dust was met with wild critical acclaim and rapturous audience response when it initially opened in 1991. Casting a long legacy, the film still resonates today, most recently as a major in influence on Beyonce's video album 'Lemonade.'
Candyman (Access ends September 30, 2025)
For decades, the housing projects of Chicago's Cabrini-Green were terrorized by a ghost story about a supernatural, hook handed killer. In present day, an artist (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) begins to explore the macabre history of Candyman, not knowing it would unravel his sanity and unleash a terrifying wave of violence that puts him on a collision course with destiny.
Black Panther (Access ends October 31, 2025)
King T'Challa returns home to the isolated, technologically advanced African nation of Wakanda to serve as new leader. However, T'Challa soon finds that he is challenged for the throne from divisions within his own country. When two enemies conspire to destroy Wakanda, the hero known as Black Panther must join forces with C.I.A. agent Everett K. Ross and members of the Wakandan Special Forces, to prevent Wakanda from being drawn into a world war.
Alma's Rainbow
A coming-of-age comedy-drama about three Black women living in Brooklyn. Ayoka Chenzira’s feature film explores the life of teenager Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) who is entering womanhood and navigating conversations and experiences around standards of beauty, self-image, and the rights Black women have over their bodies. ALMA'S RAINBOW highlights a multi-layered Black women’s world where the characters live, love, and wrestle with what it means to exert and exercise their agency.
I Am Not Your Negro: James Baldwin and Race in America
An Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO explores the continued peril America faces from institutionalized racism.
In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House. The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of three of his close friends--Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript.
Alice
ALICE (Keke Palmer) yearns for freedom as an enslaved person on a rural Georgia plantation under its brutal and disturbed owner Paul (Jonny Lee Miller). After a violent clash with Paul, she flees through the neighboring woods and stumbles onto the unfamiliar sight of a highway, soon discovering the year is actually 1973. Rescued on the roadside by a disillusioned political activist named Frank (Common), Alice quickly comprehends the lies that have kept her in bondage and the promise of Black liberation. Inspired by true events, Alice is a modern empowerment story tracing Alice’s journey through the post-Civil Rights Era American South.
A Boy. A Girl. A Dream
On the night of the 2016 Presidential election, Cass, an L.A. club promoter, takes a thrilling and emotional journey with Frida, a Midwestern visitor. She challenges him to revisit his broken dreams - while he pushes her to discover hers.
Nominated for the Best of Next Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Nominated for Outstanding Independent Feature at the Black Reel Awards.
ROOTS
A four-night, eight-hour event series, "ROOTS" is a historical portrait of one family's journey through American slavery and their will to survive and preserve their legacy in the face of unimaginable hardship.
Making Black America: Through the Grapevine
This four-hour series, hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chronicles the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people-beyond the reach of the “White gaze.” Gates takes viewers into an extraordinary world that showcases Black people’s ability to collectively prosper, defy white supremacy and define Blackness in ways that transformed America itself.
Black Patriots: Heroes of the Civil War
This documentary takes viewers through an evolution of African American involvement over the course of the Civil War through the stories of some of the most crucial and significant figures of the day.
Black Patriots: Buffalo Soldiers
The incredible story of the Nations' first all-Black peacetime regiments who fought to expand America's presence in the West, protect the National Parks, and defend the U.S. on foreign soil.
How It Feels to Be Free
How It Feels to Be Free takes an unprecedented look at the intersection of African American women artists, politics and entertainment and tells the story of how six trailblazing performers—Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, Nina Simone, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier— changed American culture through their films, fashion, music and politics.
Mr. Civil Rights: Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP
Civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall’s triumph in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to desegregate America’s public schools completed the final leg of an heroic journey to end legal segregation. For 20 years, during wartime and the Depression, Marshall had traveled hundreds of thousands of miles through the Jim Crow South of the United States, fighting segregation case by case, establishing precedent after precedent, all leading up to one of the most important legal decisions in American history.
Rise Up: The Movement that Changed America
This special explores the key battles in the Civil Rights Movement that transformed American society from the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to the Chicago Campaign which led to the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
February One: The 1960 Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-ins
In one remarkable day, four college freshmen changed the course of American history.
FEBRUARY ONE tells the inspiring story surrounding the 1960 Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins that revitalized the Civil Rights Movement and set an example of student militancy for the coming decade. This moving film shows how a small group of determined individuals can galvanize a mass movement and focus a nation’s attention on injustice. FEBRUARY ONE not only fills in one of the most important chapters in the Civil Rights Movement, it reminds us that this was a movement of ordinary people motivated to extraordinary deeds by the need to assert their basic human dignity.
O Happy Day: The Early Days of Black Gay Liberation
The seminal short film O Happy Day imagines the early days of gay liberation for black gay men. Lofton juxtaposes images of black men from late 60s and early 70s films with images of Black Panther Party demonstrations, as a way of intentionally revising history. The soundtrack is punctuated by a 1970 quotation from Black Panther leader Huey Newton:
"There's nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. Quite on the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary…"