The Film Festival

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally desegregated the South, discrimination was still rampant in certain areas, making it very difficult for Blacks to register to vote.

In 1965, an Alabama city became the battleground in the fight for suffrage. Despite violent opposition, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

(David Oyelowo) and his followers pressed forward on an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, and their efforts culminated with President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

During World War II, the Civil Aeronautics Authority selects 13 black cadets to become part of an experimental program at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

The program aims at training “colored personnel” to become fighter pilots for the Army. However, discrimination, lack of institutional support and the racist belief that these men lacked the intelligence and aptitude for the job dog their every step.

Despite this, the Tuskegee Airmen, as they become known, more than prove their worth.

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 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 30 completed pages of this manuscript.

Filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished.

The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta Lacks (Renée Elise Goldsberry), an African-American woman whose cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line.

Told through the eyes of her daughter, Deborah Lacks (Oprah Winfrey), the film chronicles her search, aided by journalist Rebecca Skloot (Rose Byrne), to learn about the mother she never knew and to understand how the unauthorized harvesting of Lacks’ cancerous cells in 1951 led to unprecedented medical breakthroughs, changing countless lives and the face of medicine forever.

Based on the unbelievably true life stories of three of these women, known as “human computers”, we follow these women as they quickly rose the ranks of NASA alongside many of history’s greatest minds specifically tasked with calculating the momentous launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, and guaranteeing his safe return.

Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Gobels Johnson crossed all gender, race, and professional lines while their brilliance and desire to dream big, beyond anything ever accomplished before by the human race, firmly cemented them in U.S. history as true American heroes. 

Salvatore “Sal” Fragione (Danny Aiello) is the Italian owner of a pizzeria in Brooklyn.

A neighborhood local, Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), becomes upset when he sees that the pizzeria’s Wall of Fame exhibits only Italian actors.

Buggin’ Out believes a pizzeria in a black neighborhood should showcase black actors, but Sal disagrees.

The wall becomes a symbol of racism and hate to Buggin’ Out and to other people in the neighborhood, and tensions rise.