This Spring, CINEMATEK and Courtisane are hosting Billy Woodberry. This is an opportunity to honour the first-rate cinematographic work of this too little-known director. The retrospective is accompanied by a carte blanche.

Born in Dallas in 1950, Billy Woodberry was one of the few African-American students who found a way to attend the UCLA Film School. Few other young Africans or African-Americans graduated from the film school at the famous University of Los Angeles in the 1960s. Charles Burnett and Haile Germa, an Ethiopian film-maker living in Chicago, paved the way for a cinema that radically departed from the Hollywood canon to depict the social reality of Black people in the United States: racism, the experiences of Black women, the civil rights movement, etc. UCLA Film School was the centre of a movement called L.A. Rebellion, whose strength lies in the fact that the films were produced and directed collectively.

Billy Woodberry is an emblematic figure. His film Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) is considered one of the best films produced by the collective. Scriptwriter Charles Burnett was also the cameraman and cinematographer of the film, while Billy Woodberry was director and editor. Despite a limited distribution, the film was almost unanimously recognised by critics as a small masterpiece, whose simple, discreet, almost shy tone offered a totally different reading from the protest films that generally adopt a furious tone. The film won awards at a number of festivals and was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in its programme to preserve America's cinematic heritage, in view of its ‘cultural, historical and aesthetic importance’.

After Bless Their Little Hearts, Woodberry gave up directing to devote himself to teaching, mainly at the California Institute of Arts. In 2005, after a long silence, he directed a short film in homage to Ousmane Sembène, Marseille après la guerre, which gives an insight into the city's port and its mostly African dockworkers. In 2015, Woodberry directed his second feature film, And When I Die I Won't Stay Dead, in which he evokes the life and work of the poet Bob Kaufman, a close friend of Allen Ginsberg who gave him the nickname ‘The Black American Rimbaud’. A Story from Africa, a short film made in 2019, brings to life a series of rarely-seen photographs showing the events of the 1907 Portuguese pacification campaign in southern Angola. Finally, most recently, Woodberry produced and directed Mário, a film that tells the extraordinary story of Mário de Andrade, the pan-African intellectual and activist who dedicated his life to the struggle for a sovereign Africa. CINEMATEK invites you to discover the all-too-anonymous work of a filmmaker whose work develops, through the specific case of Black communities in the United States and African peoples, a message with universal resonance.