Charles Burnett

Charles Burnett (b. 1944, Mississippi) is an American filmmaker, producer and screenwriter, and a leading figure of the L.A. Rebellion, a movement of African American filmmakers who studied at UCLA between the 1960s and 1980s and challenged Hollywood’s dominant representations of Black life. His debut feature, Killer of Sheep (1978), offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in a Black community in Los Angeles and stands as a landmark of American independent cinema. In films such as My Brother’s Wedding (1983), To Sleep with Anger (1990), The Glass Shield (1994) and Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation (2007), Burnett explores race, identity, memory and community through a cinema attentive to the rhythms of everyday life, oral traditions and African American spirituality. Working across fiction and documentary, he has developed a distinctive body of work that has profoundly shaped independent Black cinema in the United States. Burnett returns to LEFFEST this year as a member of the Official Competition jury.