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In May, the British Film Institute will hand long-overdue UK premieres to two landmark features of American cinema, Jessie Maple’s Will, the first feature-length independent film produced by a Black American woman, and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation, a time-hopping fable often described by critics as among the greatest independent films in U.S. history.

Both titles will arrive in London in newly minted 4K form. They will screen as part of an intriguing repertory season at the BFI titled Black Debutantes: A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors, curated by independent writer, critic, and programmer Rógan Graham.

The season will also include rare UK screenings of titles like Cauleen Smith’s seminal, indie favorite Drylongso (1998), Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1982), and Naked Acts by Bridgett M. Davis (1996).

In her curatorial notes, Graham cites a broad frustration with the absence of Black women directors with filmographies robust...

Exclusive: Burnt Milk, a film project from British-Jamaican filmmaker Joseph Douglas Elmhirst, has been acquired by the Criterion Channel.

The film is available to watch on the streamer starting today.

Running just over nine minutes, Burnt Milk was commissioned by the British Pavilion for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, marking the first time a film was included as part of the Pavilion’s official offerings.

The film was shot on rich 16mm Kodak and is shaped around a lyrical monologue voiced by Tamara Lawrance (Get Millie Black), but attributed to the fictional Una, played by first-time actor Clover Webb, who we see on-screen. She’s an older Jamaican woman in London, a member of the Windrush generation, and her life is beset by the crippling isolation of 1980’s England. Thatcher’s England. One day, she takes a moment of solace to make burnt milk, a ritual that takes her and the audience back home.

“Compensation” was well-received when it premiered at the 1999 Toronto and 2000 Sundance Film Festivals. But the black-and-white film about two Black couples, played by the same actors, living in Chicago during two different time periods, didn’t entice distributors. With a film half-set at the beginning of the 20th century while capturing the everyday life, love, and struggles of deaf characters, director Zeinabu irene Davis adopted the cinematic language of silent films of the era — which was apparently was a non-starter for potential buyers.

“In the film’s first 15 minutes, distributors were running out of the room because I didn’t have any dialogue,” said Davis on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I was like, ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ but they had no interest in it at that particular time.”

By all accounts, the film was warmly embraced by its first audiences, receiving positive reviews, including from hometown critic Roger Ebert. But without a distributor,...

Horace Ové’s masterpiece “Pressure” is getting the spotlight treatment courtesy of Janus Films and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Bam).

“Pressure” will screen for two weeks as part of the museum’s ode to Black British cinema. The program, titled “Uncharted Territories: Black Britain on Film, 1963-1986” will take place from May 3 through 7, leading up to the new 4K restoration of “Pressure,” widely regarded as the first Black British narrative feature film.

“Uncharted Territories” features rarely screened work from filmmakers of African and Caribbean heritage based in Britain. The series includes “Burning an Illusion,” directed by Menelik Shabazz (1981), John Akomfrah’s “Handsworth Songs” (1986), “Territories” directed by Isaac Julien (1984), and more. The festival is programmed by Ashley Clark.

Screenings of “Pressure” begin May 10 and will continue through May 23. Herbert Norville, Oscar James, and Frank Singuineau star in the feature that follows a London-born teen (Norville), who is the son of Trinidadian parents.

Kobi Libii’s debut feature The American Society of Magical Negroes starts on a promising note. Aren, a spindly and awkward artist (an endearing Justice Smith) loiters near a yarn sculpture in a gallery. He seems lost in the sea of roving patrons and bustling waiters. It takes a second for us to realize that Aren created the meditative wool work and is struggling to sell it to the mostly white collectors attending this group show. They find the abstract piece illegible; they repeatedly ask about the material (“Is it … yarn?”) while maintaining a distance. These brief encounters are a clever jab by Libii at a visual art world historically enamored of Black figurative artists.

Minor drama ensues after Aren is mistaken for a server by a patron and unceremoniously fired by his gallerist. Before he can think straight, the dejected artist finds himself touring the gothic halls of The American Society of Magical Negroes,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSHam on Rye.Tyler Taormina, director of the idiosyncratic Ham on Rye (2019) and Happer's Comet (2022), has wrapped production on his next feature. Filmed on Long Island, Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point is a Christmas comedy that stars Michael Cera, Elsie Fisher, and Gregg Turkington, plus the progeny of two prominent filmmakers in Francesca Scorsese and Sawyer Spielberg.The Guardian reports that filmmaker Brian Rose is attempting to “recreate” the lost version of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which was altered significantly by Rko prior to its release. Using “the latest technology to reconstruct lost material and animate charcoal sketches,” Rose has reportedly spent four years recreating “around 30,000 frames” of Welles’s original rough cut in order that viewers can visualize what Welles intended in lieu of seeing the director’s original cut,...

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After a successful awards season, “Triangle of Sadness” is one of several films being added to The Criterion Collection this month.

Directed by the irreverent Swedish satirist Ruben Östlund, the film follows two supermodels on a doomed luxury cruise that leaves the pair stranded on a deserted island along with some of their fellow passengers and a Marxist captain. The film was last year’s Palme d’Or winner and went on to receive nods for best picture, best director and best original screenplay at the 2023 Oscars.

“The thing about Östlund is that he makes you laugh, but he also makes you think,” Variety film critic Peter DeBruge wrote in his review. “There’s a meticulous precision to the way he constructs, blocks and executes scenes — a kind of agonizing unease,...