Danças Negras

Brenda Way, founder and artistic director of ODC, is a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation Community Awards "for creating a community hub through dance. She built the largest, most comprehensive contemporary dance center in the nation, and through it she inspires dancers and audiences, cultivates artists, and engages the community. Brenda is a choreographer, writer, and community activist who strengthens our region's cultural connections." - San Francisco Foundation

Controversy erupts over a New-Deal-era mural of the namesake of San Francisco’s George Washington High School. The thirteen-panel artwork "The Life of Washington" by Victor Arnautoff offers a view of the Founding Father both celebratory and critical, referencing his involvements in slavery and Native American genocide.

The film looks at men and women of color in the U.S. Merchant Marine from 1938-1975. Through chronicling the lives of these men and women who, with a median age of 82, are beset with a host of life-threatening illnesses, the movie tells how they navigated issues of racism, disparities in the workplace, gender and familial relations.

She now lives many miles away from her mother, who is waiting to hear from her. It is a bittersweet, restless, nostalgic moment, and she remembers those vanished years.

After the Battle of Algiers, France and its army exported, as true experts, anti-subversive methods to Latin America and the United States in the 1960s. After more than a year of investigation in Argentina , in Chile, Brazil, the United States and France, the director collected, sometimes under the cover of a hidden camera, recorded conversations, the exclusive testimonies of the main protagonists. From General Aussaresses to former Minister of the Armed Forces Pierre Messmer, including General Reynaldo Bignone (head of the military junta in Argentina from 1982 to 1984), General Albano Harguindéguy, General Manuel Contreras, and Generals John Johns and Carl Bernard, this investigation gives us a hidden reality of the country of Human Rights.

A small skit-documentary hybrid, written, shot and edited all in the space of a couple of hours on the 25th of October 2021, by exclusively myself, for a university project.

When an academic unearths a forgotten history, residents of the small township of Pukekohe, including kaumātua who have never told their personal stories before, confront its deep and dark racist past.

Celebrated author and Nation magazine sports editor Dave Zirin tackles the myth that the NFL was somehow free of politics before Colin Kaepernick and other Black NFL players took a knee.

Movie and stage icon Debbie Reynolds hosts the making of "Singin' in the Rain". The short documentary includes Donald O'Connor, who played the comical "Cosmo Brown", Stanley Donen, one half of the directors next to Gene Kelly, and Kathleen Freeman, who played Phoebe Dinsmore, Lina Lamont's (Jean Hagen) voice coach.

After celebrated careers , legendary dancers Marge Champion and Donald Saddler became friends while performing together in the Broadway Show Follies (2001) . When the show closed, they decided to rent a private studio together where they have been choreographing and rehearsing original dances ever since. They are both 90 years old. KEEP DANCING seamlessly blends 9 decades of archival film and photographs with present day footage to tell a story through dance of the passing of time and the process of aging.

Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Common in Jim Crow South, few women spoke up in fear for their lives. Not Recy Taylor, who bravely identified her rapists. The NAACP sent its chief rape investigator Rosa Parks, who rallied support and triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice. The film exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks’ intimate role in Recy Taylor’s story.

Discover Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (The Trocks), an all-male company that for 45 years has offered audiences their passion for ballet classics mixed with exuberant comedy. With every step they poke fun at their strictly gendered art form.

African American soldiers throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries faced discrimination and segregation, yet many still chose to fight for their country.

Based on A Few Days Full of Trouble by Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr. and Christopher Benson, the feature doc will explore two parallel tracks of the Till story. One set in motion by the last four years of an FBI investigation with details never before revealed, including significant new revelations of the case and its discoveries. The traumatic memory of Parker Jr., last surviving witness to the crime and Till’s cousin, drives that investigation. The second track is a deep immersion into the latest, proprietary findings, as high schoolers prepare for a reenactment of the murder trial of two of Till’s killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.

A couple of dancers appear one morning in a High School. It's Monday and they announce to a group of youngsters that they have five days to get up on stage and dance. A short time but a big challenge. The dance compels these youngsters to break through their roles exactly at the time of their lives when the social roles are being forged. The handsome boy is no longer the most admired, the timid one takes a step forward. Wilfried van Popple and Amaya Lubeigt are the choreographers. Professional dancers who have decided now to work with people who have never danced before. This is the challenge: five days, a class of teenagers, a microcosm in which occurs a little big bang.

In the spring of 1927, after weeks of incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, inundating hundreds of towns, killing as many as a thousand people and leaving a million homeless. In Greenville, Mississippi, efforts to contain the river pitted the majority black population against an aristocratic plantation family, the Percys, and the Percys against themselves. A dramatic story of greed, power and race during one of America's greatest natural disasters.

A filmed version of Aaron Copland's most famous ballet, with its original star, who also choreographed.

Moving Together is a celebratory love letter to music and dance that brims with kinetic life and energy. This documentary explores the intricate collaboration between dancers and musicians, moving seamlessly between Flamenco, Modern, and New Orleans Second Line.

In this documentary, Argentinians dance to their favourite hits.

The Indian Act, passed in Canada in 1876, made members of Aboriginal peoples second-class citizens, separated from the white population: nomadic for centuries, they were moved to reservations to control their behavior and resources; and thousands of their youngest members were separated from their families to be Christianized: a cultural genocide that still resonates in Canadian society today.