femfilmrogue: Directed By Women Films To Watch During MLK Jr. Weekend

Scene from Sophia Nahli Allison’s award-winning A Love Song for Latasha.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the unofficial pre-kick off before Black History Month takes over February. Films such as Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Four Little Girls, or Do The Right Thing or classics To Kill A Mockingbird and The Long Walk Home are always ranked high as the best watches for this weekend. Nowadays offensive titles like The Help and The Green Book are being added to the equation.

Other suggestions focus heavily on the Black male point of view, on justice for Black men.

Who better to highlight the Black girls and women’s own campaigns for fairness, for humanity than a Black woman behind the lens? Although Ava DuVernay’s Oscar winning Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma and Regina King’s One Night in Miami are primarily focused on Black male point of view, DuVernay and King are able to deliver nuanced perspectives thanks to their incredible direction of talented ensemble casts.

Here are solid films (including a few tearjerkers) directed by Black women that either depict true historical moments with poignant touches of fiction, bringing light to figures advocating justice or those strangely simmering in the complicated thick of finding themselves drawn to both good and bad sides of societal life. These chosen works grapple with King Jr.’s themes in creative albeit challenging manifestations: benevolence, strength, grace, humility, and growth exploring our past, present, and future in a prejudiced world still saturated in pure, undying hatred.