An homage to the Haitian revolution of 1791 when enslaved Africans rebelled against colonial rule. The slavery practiced by the French colonial administration is known as one of the cruellest periods of forced labour. The Haitian revolution set the scene for Haiti’s independence in 1804. In the video piece, walking human figures and their reflections are depicted against the sky on a mountain-top fort, which was built by the first Black Haitian monarch, Henri Christophe, at the start of the 19th century to defend independent Haiti against the French.—Espoo Museum of Modern Art

The talented Fuego Mansa Mufasa, exhibiting the visuals of the 1966 Cleveland, Ohio uprising.

A castle, children’s games, the waves of a small coastal village in the Caribbean, an ancient cemetery … [Charles] solicits reality to feed her imagination and translate through the power of cinema her own questions about immigration, family ties, and the feeling of belonging. Lulled by soft Creole tunes, Song for the New World is a true waking dream where the Old and the New World converge, calling for contemplation and the nostalgia of exile.—Jason Burnham

Pseudosphinx is the scientific name of the fire caterpillars soon to become butterflies, or as they’re commonly (and auspiciously) called: witches. Pseudosphinx is at the same time sphinx, meaning inhuman chthonic monstrosity that spells charades; and pseudo, as in artificial, insincere, deceptive, unreal, illusive, mimetic. Pseudosphynx keeps its meaning veiled, like a secret kept by those who save in their retinas the haptic impression of its fight.

Prefaces is composed of wild sounds structured along entropic lines, placed tensely beside bebop rhythms, and a resurfacing narrative cut from dialogue with the poet Hannah Weiner. The tracks are placed in precise and asynchronous relation to images of workers, the gestures of the marketplace, colonial Africa, and abstractions, to pose questions of social force, gender relations, and subordination.

And the Dogs Kept Silent is based on recorded excerpts from the play Et les chiens se taisaient (1958) by the Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008).

The life of a man, a revolutionary, relived by him at the moment of death in the middle of a great collective disaster. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures stored at the Musée de l’Homme, the Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris. Sarah Maldoror had been planning to stage this tragic poem since the 1950s, finally interpreted here by Gabriel Glissant and the filmmaker herself, and also integrating three spectators in their game who take the role of silent witnesses.—Sabzian

An incantation of multiple architectures of the self for Black women … This tribute to the manual labours of creation, which closes with a gesture of Black feminist arson, forms a contact zone between the respective practices of sculpture and filmmaking. The wandering hypnosis of Hunt-Ehrlich’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography ritualizes the assertive elegance of Leigh’s craftsmanship of clay and stone … This shared composition is directed by a mesmerizing attentiveness to the haptics of sculptural labour … Leigh and Hunt-Ehrlich’s film performs an enchanting re-citation of Hands of Inge (1962), a documentary about the artist Ruth Inge Hardison. An actor and photographer, Hardison was most dedicated to her practice as a sculptor … Leigh and Hunt-Ehrlich have had a decade-long creative friendship, which makes this film an extension of an ongoing conversation that both also share with a larger constellation of Black women cultural workers.—Yasmina Price