Movies: National Endowment For The Arts

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 b...

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...

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....

This winner of the 1993 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature details the case that the 1989 invasion of Panama by the US was motivated not by the need to protect American soldiers, restore democracy or even capture Noriega. It was to force Pana...

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 De...

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 forgotte...

"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. Preserve...

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 paradox...

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 un...

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 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 tra...

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 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....

Ancient of Days is a remarkable series of "canons and fugues for video" that comprises Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical explorations of time. Mathematical notations of precise time-code editing were applied to construct illustra...

Viola's seminal piece, The Reflecting Pool, was made three decades ago on analogue video tape and yet could easily pass for a contemporary digital piece; in it, Viola emerges as central protagonist from a thick forest into a clearing filled by an art...

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...

Driven by a quest to capture a landscape reduced to flatness and sky, Viola travels to Chott El-Djerid. The film opens with images of snowy prairies and winter scenes, mirrored by warm, vibrating desert vistas. Through powerful telephoto lenses, shim...

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 A...

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 ci...