AFI Catalog Spotlight: HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A.

In honor of Labor Day, AFI celebrates HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A. (1976), Barbara Kopple’s Oscar®-winning documentary that follows a violent miner’s strike in a small Kentucky town, capturing the passion, bravery and hard-fought victories of workers as they attempt to unionize. HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A. was made possible in part by a $10,000 Independent Filmmaker Grant from...

AFI Catalog Spotlight: SOUL TO SOUL

Released 50 years ago this August, SOUL TO SOUL (1971) documents a 14-hour concert event of the same name that took place in Accra, Ghana, to celebrate the country’s 14th anniversary of independence from British colonial rule. On March 6, 1971, a crowd of over 100,000 Africans gathered in the capital city of Ghana to...

AFI Catalog Spotlight: SHAFT

Celebrating its 50th anniversary release this month, SHAFT (1971) tells the story of the eponymous John Shaft, performed by Richard Roundtree in his first major film role. The film – based on a novel by white journalist and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman – introduces Shaft as a suave, two-fisted Black private eye who was hired to...

AFI Catalog Spotlight: William Haines

In honor of LGBTQ Pride Month, the AFI Catalog spotlights William Haines, the first openly gay American film actor, whose 47-year partnership with Jimmie Shields was once described by their friend, Joan Crawford, as the happiest marriage in Hollywood. Haines began life in Staunton, Virginia, where he was the third child of seven. Running away...

AFI Catalog Spotlight: Anna May Wong

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, the AFI Catalog spotlights America’s first female Asian American movie star, Anna May Wong, who spent her career defying racial stereotypes and paving the road for greater diversity in Hollywood. Growing up in Los Angeles’s Chinatown neighborhood, Anna May Wong secretly skipped classes to pursue a different...

AFI Catalog Spotlight: June Mathis and THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE

One hundred years ago this month, THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE was running in theaters across the country to become the highest grossing movie of the year and one of the first silent films to make $1 million, topping Charlie Chaplin’s classic THE KID (1921). Adapted for the screen by June Mathis, head of...

AFI Catalog Spotlight: “Women They Talk About”

Women were forerunners of the film industry. In honor of Women’s History Month, the AFI Catalog Spotlight is focused on Women They Talk About, an NEH-funded AFI initiative documenting the widely unrecorded contributions of female filmmakers in the silent film era and uncovering the true story of women’s pioneering role in the creation of American...

AFI Catalog Spotlight: Alice B. Russell

Modern scholars have recently begun to study the profound yet generally unhistoricized impact that women of color made to the establishment of the film industry, including pioneering African American women who were making films in the silent era, including Eslanda Robeson, Eloyce King Patrick Gist, Zora Neale Hurston, Tressie Souders, Maria P. Williams – and...
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