National Endowment for the Arts

A celebration of Dr. Maya Angelou by weaving her words with rare and intimate archival photographs and videos, which paint hidden moments of her exuberant life during some of America’s most defining civil rights moments. From her upbringing in the Depression-era South to her swinging soirees with Malcolm X in Ghana to her inaugural speech for President Bill Clinton, we are given special access to interviews with Dr. Angelou whose indelible charm and quick wit make it easy to love her.

A musical horror story about two young women who are stalked through a shopping mall by a cannibal. He follows them home, and here the victims become the aggressors.

On March 11, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s 'A Raisin in the Sun' opened on Broadway and changed the face of American theater forever. As the first-ever black woman to author a play performed on Broadway, she did not shy away from richly drawn characters and unprecedented subject matter. The play attracted record crowds and earned the coveted top prize from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. While the play is seen as a groundbreaking work of art, the timely story of Hansberry’s life is far less known.

In the early 1970s, a group of secretaries in Boston decided that they had suffered in silence long enough. They started fighting back, creating a movement to force changes in their workplaces. This movement became national, and is a largely forgotten story of U.S. twentieth century history. It encapsulates a unique intersection of the women’s movement with the labor movement. The awareness these secretaries brought to bear on women’s work reverberates even today. Clericals were the low-wage workers of their era. America now confronts the growing reality of deep income inequality. The stories and strategies of these bold, creative women resonates in contemporary America.

When five Howard University students sat on a segregated Maryland carousel in 1960, the arrests made headlines. When the largely Jewish community near Glen Echo Amusement Park joined the Black students in picketing, the first organized interracial civil rights protest in US history was born.

Orson Welles reads the poem especially for this film by Larry Jordan, which is dedicated to the late Wallace Berman, and is made possible by a grant from The National Endowment Of The Arts.

A performance piece written by Sam Shepard, enacted by Joseph Chaikin and directed by Shirley Clarke, a dying man reflects on his life while delivering his own last rites.

A philosophical flume ride through the physical, political and moral borders that inhibit the free movement of people and ideas. Mixing commentary, computer graphics, dramatizations, and investigative journalism, Borders probes the unsettling paradoxes behind immigration, drugs, Star Wars, and other topics.

"Marlborough" and "The Arab", lounging on the pool terrace, are alienated characters in some future time, living in a world where art work comes to life, phones continuously ring, televisions hum all night, and smog seeps into their brains. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Inspired by the Greek myth of Prometheus, a Titan who created the first mortals from clay and stole fire from the gods, Prometheus' Garden immerses viewers in a cinematic universe unlike any other. The dark and magical images of this haunting film unfold in a dreamlike stream of consciousness revealing an unlikely cast of characters engaged in a violent struggle for survival.

Firdaus is a Blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas landscape juxtaposed between glittering casino lights and the deteriorating desert oasis. Negotiating a missing husband and neighboring domestic violence, Firdaus’ world unfolds as a fragmented interplay between repetition and repressed anger.

This work is Woody's first entry into the narrative sphere, whereby the "story" is continually undermined with the aid of various anti-narrative strategies: In each of the eleven segments of this "electronic opera", different effects are used. Fascinated with the remarkable personality of infamous violinist Niccola Paganini and his complicated relationship to Hector Berlioz (played by artists Ernie Gusella and Robert Ashley, respectively), the author meditates over the intricacies of artistic geniality as connected not only with fame but also with the necessity of painful survival under the pressures of the art market.

A PBS documentary on the life and work of writer Raymond Carver. It features interviews with his family and friends, and provides an insightful look at his short stories and poems.

A 65-year-old cleaning woman for a professional dancers' exercise studio performs her job while telling us in voiceover about her life, hopes, goals, and feelings. A challenge to mainstream media's ongoing stereotypes of women of color who earn their living as domestic workers, this seemingly simple documentary achieves a quiet revolution: the expressive portrait of a fully realized individual.

Against a field of swaying and halting yellow vegetation, another processed field: the image of the eponymous subject (performed by painter Doris Cross) riles and emits unintelligibly to the viewer. Conjuring the mystical biblical character Lilith, Steina's video layers both sound and image to produce an ever-shifting, frustrated presence.

Consistent stylistic-thematic structures link and merge throughout the bewildering event chain. The distinction between organic forms and human artifacts is blurred by the visual style which is enigmatic without being ambiguous.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

Produced by the National Endowment for the Arts, along with the Jerome Foundation, this showcase is hour-long collection of shorts from six prominent video artists, all commissioned to the state of Minnesota.

Story about the last original "American Diner" in Miami, Florida. Since 1938 the S & S has been owned and operated by the family of the present owners, Charles and Jean Cavalaris. The S & S Diner is the ubiquitous Miami landmark on Northeast Second Avenue, known for serving large portions of homestyle food.