The Lemon Grove Incident

A year in the life of an underdog competitive high school mariachi band in the Texas borderlands.

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.

Using rare historical footage, vintage musical recordings, and interviews with 88-year-old Pedro J. Gonzalez and his wife, this film chronicles Gonzalez’s long and colorful life, from his early days with Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution, to his career as a popular radio personality in Los Angeles in the 1930s, to the controversial court case that sent him to San Prison, a victim of the repressive forces operating against the Chicano/Mexicano community during that period.

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.

In White Like Me, anti-racist educator Tim Wise explores race and racism in the US through the lens of whiteness and white privilege.

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 look at three U.S. cities, which were part of many communities that violently forced African American families to flee in post-reconstruction America.

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.

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?

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.”

While gun violence was on the decline in most major US cities, why did it continue to increase in Chicago's segregated communities? What is known about the systems that created the problem, the laws that isolated it, and the policies that abandoned it? Using dramatic footage, including interviews with residents on the front lines over the last 15 years, this documentary opens a rare historical window into the systematic creation of poverty stricken communities plagued by gun violence. 

The life story of Richard Pryor (1940-2005), the legendary performer and iconic social satirist who transcended racial and social barriers with his honest, irreverent and biting humor.

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.

During a two-day period before and after the University of Alabama integration crisis, the film uses five camera crews to follow President John F. Kennedy, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, Alabama governor George Wallace, deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach and the students Vivian Malone and James Hood. As Wallace has promised to personally block the two black students from enrolling in the university, the JFK administration discusses the best way to react to it, without rousing the crowd or making Wallace a martyr for the segregationist cause. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1999.

This cinematic reportage with elements of a personal journal explores xenophobia in Czech society and anti-Nazi activists, but also the filmmaker’s personal experience from living among in an socially excluded Romani neighborhood. Most of the footage was shot by the director using his own camera, and the immediacy of the images is further accentuated by voiceover observations and commentary. In just a few scenes, he adds music for dramatic affect. With his direct questions, he tries to unmask the racist arguments not only of anti-Roma protestors, but also of many ordinary citizens.

A man that is a stranger, is an incredibly easy man to hate. However, walking in a stranger’s shoes, even for a short while, can transform a perceived adversary into an ally. Power is found in coming to know our neighbor’s hearts. For in the darkness of ignorance, enemies are made and wars are waged, but in the light of understanding, family extends beyond blood lines and legacies of hatred crumble.

In 1936, Victor H. Green (1892-1960) published The Negro Motorist Green Book, a book that was both a travel guide and a survival manual, to help African-Americans navigate safe those regions of the United States where segregation and Jim Crow laws were disgracefully applied.

A historical analysis of how groups such as the Nazi’s may use language, symbols, and religious connotation in order to come to power. It raises questions that deserve in depth analysis and consideration. Questions include: Where do legends expand our thinking and where do they bury it? When does spiritual pursuit suddenly turn into fanaticism and violence? Last, have we as a society learned from our past, and if so have forgotten the lessons of the 20th Century? Are we now embarking on a new level only to learn the same old lessons about humanity again? In addressing these questions we are taken into the back drop of the history of Germany beginning in the late 1800’s through the late 20th Century at the eve of the 21st. “A society that does not take archetypes, myths, and symbols seriously will possibly be jumped by them from behind.”

Chicano is an exploration between the similarities and differences between Chicano culture in America and Japan, and how the scene is not all about gang culture, but has a deep-seated root in family values.

How did a poor little black girl from Missouri become the Queen of Paris, before joining the French Resistance and finally creating her dream family “The Rainbow Tribe”, adopting twelve children from four corners of the world? This is the fabulous story of the first black superstar, Josephine Baker.