Black Renaissance Film Series final night is a screening of a powerful and compelling film, written and directed by the great Charles Burnett (his first film), and presented for the first time in HD! Proclaimed a national treasure by The Library of Congress.

Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is one of the most powerful, quietly devastating movies about the black experience in Los Angeles and America ever put to film. It tells in beautiful, haunting episodes, the life of a black family in South Central Los Angeles in the 1970’s. The father, who is a “killer of sheep” at a local slaughterhouse, works himself to the bone to support his family, while his children wander the neighborhood in the afternoons witnessing random moments of desperation amongst the neighbors, and his wife slowly works to fight off depression and despair.

Yet Killer of Sheep is anything but depressing. It is at turns despairing, romantic, tough, hopeful, determined. Most of all, it is powerful, it is honest, is about the strength of a family that comes from the mere act of day to day survival.