Black Sweat

6.7

Liberty Heights

November 1999 •English

This semi-autobiographical film by Barry Levinson follows various members of the Kurtzman clan, a Jewish family living in suburban Baltimore during the 1950s. As teenaged Ben completes high school, he falls for Sylvia, a black classmate, creating inevitable tensions. Meanwhile, Ben's brother, Van, attends college and becomes smitten with a mysterious woman while their father tries to maintain his burlesque business.

7.7

A Raisin in the Sun

May 1961 •English

Walter Lee Younger is a young man struggling with his station in life. Sharing a tiny apartment with his wife, son, sister and mother, he seems like an imprisoned man. Until, that is, the family gets an unexpected financial windfall.

6.7

Measures of Men

February 2023 •German

Berlin at the end of the 19th Century. Alexander Hoffmann is an ambitious PhD student of Ethnology. When a delegation of the Herero and Nama tribes travels to Berlin during a ‘Colonial Exhibition’, he takes a special interest in their young female translator Kezia Kambazembi as subject for his studies.

5.5

The Illustrated Man

March 1969 •English

A man who has a body almost completely covered in tattoos is searching for the woman who cursed him with the "skin illustrations". Each tattoo reveals a bizarre story, which is experienced by staring at the scene depicted. When the illustrated man meets a fellow tramp on the road a strange voyage begins.

7.0

West of Zanzibar

November 1928 •English

A magician seeks vengeance upon the man who paralyzed him and the illegitimate daughter he sired with the magician's wife.

6.3

Greased Lightning

July 1977 •English

The true life story of Wendell Scott, the first black stock car racing driver to win an upper-tier NASCAR race.

6.4

Ramona

March 1928 •English

Based on the Helen Hunt Jackson novel of 1884 about a young woman of partial Native American descent, who experiences love and loss in 1800s California.

1.0

1 Berlin-Harlem

January 1974 •German

An African-American GI retires from the US Army in West Berlin to live with his (white) girlfriend, who already has a baby with another black man. After an argument with her family, she deserts him as well. Despite finding a job and a new place to live, he keeps running into racism, which also manifests itself in sexual intimidation.

6.9

The Fence

September 2022 •English

The story kicks off on Hartcliffe council estate in Bristol during the early 1980s. It follows Steven Knight, a working-class boy who has his motorbike stolen the day he buys it. Teaming up with his scoundrel friends he desperately tries to track it down before it's gone for good.

4.6

Firehouse

January 1973 •English

Conflict erupts within a close-knit engine company of a big-city fire department when a black recruit and a bigoted white veteran clash during a wave of suspected arson in the ghetto. Pilot to the short-lived series that began a run in January 1974.

6.0

Coonskin

August 1975 •English

Brother Rabbit, Brother Bear, and Preacher Fox rise to the top of the crime ranks in Harlem by going up against a con-man, a racist cop, and the Mafia.

6.9

No Way Out

August 1950 •English

Two hoodlum brothers are brought into a hospital for gunshot wounds, and when one of them dies the other accuses their black doctor of murder.

6.4

White Hunter, Black Heart

May 1990 •English

Renowned filmmaker John Wilson travels to Africa to direct a new movie, but constantly leaves to hunt elephants and other game, to the dismay of his cast and crew. He eventually becomes obsessed with hunting down and killing one specific elephant.

7.0

Jamila, the Algerian

December 1958 •Arabic

Djamila, a young Algerian woman living with her brother Hadi and her uncle Mustafa in the Casbah district of Algiers under the French occupation of Algeria, sees the full extent of injustice, tyranny and cruelty on his compatriots by French soldiers. Jamila's nationalist spirit will be strengthened when French forces invade her university to arrest her classmate Amina who commits suicide by ingesting poison. Shortly after the prominent Algerian guerrilla leader Youssef takes refuge with her, she realizes that her uncle Mustafa is part of this network of anti-colonial rebel fighters. Her uncle linked her to the National Liberation Front (FLN). A series of events illustrate Jamila's participation in resistance operations against the occupier before she was finally captured and tortured. Finally, despite the efforts of her French lawyer, Jamila is sentenced to death...

7.1

Wild Reeds

June 1994 •French

As the Algerian War draws to a close, a teenager with a girlfriend starts feeling homosexual urges for two of his classmates: a country boy, and a French-Algerian intellectual.

6.8

Odds Against Tomorrow

October 1959 •English

An old-time crook plans a heist. When one of his two partners is found out to be a black man tensions flare.

6.8

Conrack

March 1974 •English

A young, white school teacher is assigned to Yamacraw Island, an isolated fishing community off the coast of South Carolina, populated mostly by poor black families. He finds that the basically illiterate, neglected children there know so little of the world outside their island.

6.3

Corbo

September 2015 •French

Montreal, spring 1966. Jean Corbo, 16 years old, born to a Quebec mother and an Italian father, is torn between his two affiliations. After befriending two young far-left activists, he joined the Front de Libération du Québec, an underground radical group. Jean, from then on, marches inexorably towards his destiny.

7.6

Beasts of No Nation

September 2015 •English

Based on the experiences of Agu, a child fighting in the civil war of an unnamed, fictional West African country. Follows Agu's journey as he's forced to join a group of soldiers. While he fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination.

0.0

Flight of the Swan

October 1992 •English

A young girl leaves her Nigerian village to attend a ballet school in England. Fascinated by Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, she dreams of performing as lead ballerina Princess Odette, but the girls in her close-minded ballet school mock her ideas of a 'black swan'.