11 Black Filmmakers You Should Know

By Lisa Kennedy,

Yes, Spike Lee. This director (as well as writer and actor) is one of the best-known and -lauded filmmakers (Black or otherwise) of our time, and for good reason. But it’s high time movie lovers expanded their knowledge beyond Lee, because there’s a deep bench of talented directors who’ve made films we’ve loved and have yet to discover. Here are 11 moviemakers you should put in your streaming queue — from up-and-comers to their mighty fine mentors.

Carl Franklin

Like many working filmmakers of color, Carl Franklin, 71, has spent much of the last two decades plying his craft in television. But 1991’s crime drama One False Move garnered an Indie Spirit Award and critical accolades, and the 1995 adaptation of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress — starring Denzel Washington as private eye Easy Rawlins — unforgettably introduced us to actor Don Cheadle, who roars as Easy’s friend Mouse.

Ava DuVernay

The onetime movie publicist has become a mini-mogul with major purpose — at home in movie theaters (Oscar-nominated Selma) or streaming (Emmy-winning miniseries When They See Us). Like Spike Lee, DuVernay is dedicated to bringing other filmmakers along for the ride, for example by hiring female directors for her Oprah-supported OWN series, Queen Sugar.

Philip Youmans

The pup of the list, the 20-year-old Youmans is among the gifted filmmakers DuVernay champions. Her company, Array, distributed his debut, Burning Cane, an elegiac drama that tells the story of a woman of faith whose son is faltering and a rural minister who’s grappling with his own failings. The film took home big awards at the Tribeca Film Festival: best feature, best cinematography, and best actor for Wendell Pierce (Treme) as the tippling pastor. Youmans may be just starting out, but what promise and what a mentor.

Charles Burnett

This MacArthur genius fellow’s UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep, was among the first movies inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Having moved as a child from Mississippi to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, Burnett has a profound feel for one of the vital routes of the Great Migration, and the rural and urban get their due in Killer of Sheep and his darkly hilarious To Sleep With Anger, in which Danny Glover plays an old friend from the South who overstays his welcome.

Kasi Lemmons

Lemmons’ 1997 debut as writer-director, Eve’s Bayou — about a young daughter (Jurnee Smollett in her big-screen debut) grasping the transgressions of her father, a Louisiana doctor (Samuel L. Jackson) — earned her the National Board of Review’s best directorial debut nod and the Independent Spirit Award for best first feature. Since then, her projects have been ambitious (Caveman’s Valentine with Jackson portraying a homeless man with schizophrenia); wild and smart fun (Talk to Me with Don Cheadle eating up the joint as the jawing radio personality Ralph “Petey” Greene); and historically rousing (Harriet with Cynthia Erivo returning to the scene of the national crime as former slave-abolitionist Harriet Tubman). In 2018, Eve’s Bayou was placed on the National Film Registry.

Michael Schultz

The 81-year-old was still racking up episodic TV credits as recently as last year, but it was his ‘70s comedies Cooley High, Car Wash — featuring funnymen Richard Pryor and George Carlin and a killer soundtrack — and Greased Lightning that made him a Hollywood atypical: a very busy Black director.

Radha Blank

The playwright and performance artist crashed the movie party at Sundance this year with her sumptuous, oh-so-hilarious B&W debut film, The Forty-Year-Old Version, about a frustrated playwright who decides later in life she wants to be a rapper. Blank — who wrote, directed and starred — got the Sundance directing prize, and Netflix snagged the movie with plans to release in October. Wanna play the one-degree-of-separation-from-Spike-Lee game? Not only does her film visually reference She’s Gotta Have It, Blank was a writer on the Netflix series of the same name, based on Nola Darling’s continuing adventures.

Ryan Coogler

From his poignant 2013 debut, Fruitvale Station, to Creed — a smart reboot of the Rocky franchise — to the Marvel multiverse-expanding superhero flick Black Panther, Coogler has hardwired his characters’ tender and often besieged depths into each of his films. Even Erik Killmonger, the Black Panther baddie to Chadwick Boseman’s King T’Challa, has his hard-to-discount reasons for being such a disrupter.

Barry Jenkins

If Spike Lee is the filmmaker whose love for Black folk permeates the screen, Jenkins in his first three films has become the undisputed champion of what Black love looks like. Medicine for Melancholy followed two Bay Area hipsters launching their affair. His adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk lavished a lush and loving gaze on the central couple. Oscar-winning Moonlight focused beautifully on the love of surrogate dad Juan for Little as well as the yearning that onetime child carries for his childhood friend.

Roger Ross Williams

The Oscar-winning filmmaker’s list of feature documentaries cuts a wonderfully wide swath in subject matter: from the incursion of American evangelicals into Uganda and its effects on that African nation’s politics (God Loves Uganda); to a kid breaking through his autistic silence with the aid of Disney characters (Oscar-nominated Life, Animated); to a loving look at Harlem’s palace of culture in a film as intricate as it is rousing (Emmy-nominated The Apollo). He received an Oscar for his 2010 short, Music by Prudence, about Prudence Mabhena, a diminutive singer with a big voice and a disability.

Sidney Poitier

We know him as an Oscar-winning acting great. And at 93, he deserves every minute of his retirement. But his work as an actor-director — particularly in the ‘70s — still puts the “blast” in “blast from the past.” As actor-director, Poitier began with 1972’s Buck and the Preacher, and you can do the same in getting to know this artist anew. In the film, Poitier and Harry Belafonte have sweet chemistry as an upright wagon trail leader and an iffy minister, respectively, who join forces to help a group of former Louisiana slaves make it west as night riders attempt to turn them back. His comedies with Bill Cosby — Uptown Saturday Night and Let’s Do It Again were two — almost lift Poitier above the latter’s disgrace. Almost. Meanwhile, Poitier’s illness-fated 1972 love story A Warm December — with him as a widower and Ester Anderson as an African princess — feels like a lost find.