***7pm Screening on 6/25 Hosted by Sergio Mims, Festival Consultant of the Black Harvest Film Festival***

The granddaddy of 90s hood dramas charts the diverging fates of three friends—including rapper Ice Cube, making a big impression in his first film—coming of age in the urban warzone of South Central LA. John Singleton became the first black filmmaker ever nominated for a Best Director Oscar for his still-potent debut, a landmark look at the devastation of gang violence and the young men caught in its cycle. - BAM

John Singleton's follow-up to Boyz n the Hood casts two of the biggest music superstars of the 90s—Janet Jackson (sporting now-iconic box braids) and Tupac Shakur (displaying his softer side)—and builds a free-flowing road movie romance around their undeniable chemistry. Peppered with the poetry of Maya Angelou, POETIC JUSTICE is a sensitive, hopeful depiction of black struggle, joy, and creativity. - BAM

***Hosted by Sergio Mims, Festival Consultant of the Black Harvest Film Festival***

America is a country obsessed with neatly forgetting its past, and ROSEWOOD was a film eager to force remembrance. In many of his films, but particularly in ROSEWOOD, Singleton chose to see black people as more than just victims of violence, or capable of carrying out violence. Rosewood becomes a town worth mourning by the film's end because of how Singleton depicts the lives of the people in the town before the violence finds them. At its heart, ROSEWOOD is a love story, between two of its main characters (Ving Rhames' Mann and Elise Neal's Beulah), but also a love story about people who didn't have much, fighting to keep what they gained.

ROSEWOOD is a spectacular film that — like many of Singleton's efforts — defines the level of emotional intensity early, and then maintains that level the entire time. Also, like many of Singleton's efforts, it doesn't offer a solution for the whirlwind of peril or violence, just the reality of its aftermath. - Hanif Abdurraqib