Writing

Toni Cade Bambara

Born 1939-03-25 · Harlem, New York, USA

Acting credits

Brincando el Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican poster
NR

Contemplates the notion of "identity" through the experiences of a Puerto Rican woman living in the US. In a wonderful mix of fiction, archival footage, processed interviews and soap opera drama, the film tells the story of Claudia Marin, a middle-class, light-skinned, lesbian Puerto Rican photographer / videographer who is attempting to construct a sense of community in the US. Confronting the simultaneity of both her privilege and her oppression, this experimental narrative becomes a meditation on class, race, and sexuality as shifting differences.

Brincando el Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican

1994

W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices poster
6.5

The long and remarkable life of Dr. William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B) Du Bois (1868-1963) offers unique insights into an eventful century in African American history. Born three years after the end of the Civil War, Du Bois witnessed the imposition of Jim Crow, its defeat by the Civil Rights Movement and the triumph of African independence struggles. Du Bois was the consummate scholar-activist whose path-breaking works remain among the most significant and articulate ever produced on the subject of race. His contributions and legacy have been so far-reaching, that this, his first film biography, required the collaboration of four prominent African American writers. Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka narrate successive periods of Du Bois' life and discuss its impact on their work.

W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices

1996

Seven Songs for Malcolm X poster
10.0

The Black Audio Film Collective’s seventh film envisioned the death and life of the African American revolutionary as a seven part study in iconography as narrated by novelist Toni Cade Bambara and actor Giancarlo Espesito. The stylized tableaux vivants that memorialise Malcolm’s life referenced the early 20th century funeral photography of James Van der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and the elemental static cinematography of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

Seven Songs for Malcolm X

1993

Midnight Ramble poster
7.3

A documentary chronicling the pioneering efforts of black filmmaker William D. Foster in the early years of the industry and Oscar Micheaux's controversial impact on the subsequent "race movies".

Midnight Ramble

1994

Behind the camera