Series Site
While many of his Black UCLA film school classmates who would likewise be associated with the L.A. Rebellion movement gravitated towards a film language that was something like African American neorealism, Jamaa Fanaka marched to his own drum, seeking to reflect Black American experience in the form of genre films made for popular audiences. This ambition was already clear in Fanaka’s Emma Mae—made when he was still in film school, and eventually picked up for theatrical distribution—and to accompany our run of that film, we’re presenting three more of Fanaka’s finest, including the first two entries in his criminally enjoyable Penitentiary series. Tackling incarceration, systematic racism, and other hot-button issues within the framework of genre, these films prove Fanaka, though a born entertainer with an eye for the drive-in crowd, was no less a conscientious artist than his more highbrow Rebellion contemporaries.