with Charles Burnett

One of the unsung masterpieces of African American filmmaking, Charles Burnett’s first feature began life as a graduate student project at UCLA. Using semi-documentary techniques and a cast of nonprofessional actors, Burnett created an impressionistic yet finely detailed account of family and community ties within the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles, then set it to an unforgettable soundtrack of blues, jazz, pop and classical music. The film focuses on working-class father Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), who butchers sheep at a local slaughterhouse and suffers from job-related insomnia. First seen at film festivals in 1977, but not commercially released until this year, Killer of Sheep presages the auteurist African American cinema of Spike Lee and John Singleton, and sounds a clarion call for social change.