(Oscar Micheaux, US 1920, 79 min., 35mm)
In this classic silent film, maverick African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux tackles the upheaval of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Jasper Landry (William Stark), a Black sharecropper, is framed for the murder of a wealthy white planter and finds himself on the run from a lynch mob. Micheaux mirrors this story with a modern tale of a Black woman, who—while struggling to save a school for impoverished children—discovers her father is white. Micheaux wrote and directed the film in direct reaction to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which had been released only five years earlier. The earliest extant race film, Within Our Gates was thought lost for decades before a copy was found at the Filmoteca Española in Madrid in 1990. Preserved by the Library of Congress.
Live piano accompaniment by Philip Carli.