Preoccupied by sterile distractions and empty references, humankind today finds it increasingly difficult to focus on the key issues of the past and present with any genuine interest and emotion. For in the absence of intellectual drive and passion, it is impossible to effectively stay engaged in the most pressing causes. Over the course of his sporadic career—films that were made infrequently but whose political and creative punch were packed intensely into each—Billy Woodberry has set out to uncover or reopen often overlooked circumstances and episodes in history. Reclaiming what written history considered to be irrelevant in order to bring them into the spotlight, not simply as a form of activism, but also to capture their sensorial and poetic dimension.  

Born in Dallas in 1950, Woodberry was one of the founders of the L.A. Rebellion movement along with Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima, a beacon of African-American film made up of a group of UCLA students who imagined a different kind of independent scene, one that speaks to the real life of black communities in the United States and beyond. His first foray into filmmaking, the short film The Pocketbook (1980), observed a young thief in an insightful tale of apprenticeship, followed by the feature length film Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), an essential film for his generation, influenced by neorealism and Third Cinema filmmakers, about the collapse of an African-American family in the face of the father's difficulties finding work. The film, which featured Charles Burnett as screenwriter and cinematographer, won awards at the Berlinale and toured worldwide, but Woodberry quit filmmaking to dedicate himself to teaching.  

At the turn of the century, he decided to start from scratch, completely reformulating himself as a filmmaker and taking audiovisual and photographic archive footage to serve as raw material for his subsequent films. Documentaries made through and about memory, films that called upon the inescapable figures who shook up the artistic and political scenes of African and Afro-descendant communities, such as Ousmane  Sembène in Marseille après La Guerre (2005),  Bob Kaufman in And When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead (2015), and Mário Pinto de Andrade in Mário (2014). Woodberry's film work provides a sensitive but rebellious perspective of the past, one that calls out persisting traces of colonialism and inspires us to overcome them through the legends that fought with actions, verses and images for freedom and black identity. (JHE) 

The Reina Sofia Museum and Documenta Madrid are dedicating this Billy Woodberry retrospective, whose filmography, although reduced in number of films, is characterized by great political and creative intensity. Javier H. Estrada is a member of selection commitee and curator of The Roots Rebellion. The Film Work of Billy Woodberry.

Organization: Museo Reina Sofía y Documenta Madrid