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Ripples of the L.A. Rebellion

Honoring A Movement that Changed American Cinema

Still frame from Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett

About the L.A. Rebellion: The legacy of the program is most known in the film movement called The L.A. Rebellion which produced American film luminaries, including Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Montezuma Esparza, Sylvia Morales, Duane Kubo and Professor Emeritus Bob Nakamura. They produced films about each other’s communities in a coalition practice that has since inspired so many other renowned filmmakers over the decades. No other student program has contributed so significantly to the Library of Congress in representing the very best of American film practices.

Today, TFT is producing a speaker, screening and performance series entitled “Ripples of the L.A. Rebellion” to claim our legacy in rediscovering the impact of the movement in diversifying Hollywood and in transforming higher education in film and theater arts, particularly in popular classes that are still taught today, Cinema of Social Change and the Cinema of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In defining a global curriculum that simultaneously addresses production, history, theory and criticism, the curricular model is mimicked the world over.

Our distinction extends beyond the arts. UCLA’s research contributions through the Hollywood Diversity Report, produced by our Social Sciences division, have fundamentally shaped national conversations about representation in media industries. This data-driven work tracks and influences equity in casting, directing, writing and executive leadership across film and television, making TFT and UCLA a leader not only in creative practice but in the scholarship that holds the industry accountable. 

Image credit: Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett

Programming and Events

27
Feb
Friday, February 27, 2026
6:00 pm
Darren Star Theater

THIRD ACT by Tadashi Nakamura: Screening and Q&A

Friday, February 27, 2026 6:00 p.m. – Reception 7:00 p.m. – Screening followed by a Q&A About Third Act: Generations of artists call Robert A. Nakamura “the Godfather of Asian…
Event Details

L.A. Rebellion Today

Publication

Toward a More Perfect Rebellion

Toward a More Perfect Rebellion tells the riveting story of the socially engaged filmmakers of color who studied in the Ethno-Communications Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, between 1969 and 1973. While the program is best known for training the trailblazing group of Black directors known as the L.A. Rebellion, this book also includes the radical Asian American, Chicana/o, and Native American filmmakers who collaborated alongside their Black classmates to create one of the most expansive and groundbreaking bodies of work of any US university cohort. Through extensive interviews with the filmmakers and cross-racial analysis of their collective filmography, Josslyn Jeanine Luckett sheds light on a largely untold history of media activists working outside Hollywood yet firmly rooted in Los Angeles, aiming their cameras with urgency and tenderness to capture their communities’ stories of power, struggle, and improvisational brilliance.
Josslyn Luckett
View Publication
New Release

THIRD ACT by Tadashi Nakamura

Generations of artists call Robert A. Nakamura “The Godfather of Asian American film,” but his son, Tad, calls him Dad. As the filmmaking son of a filmmaking legend, Tad uses the lessons his dad taught him to decipher the legacy of an aging man who was a child survivor of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans, a successful photographer who gave it up to tell his own story, an activist at the dawn of a social movement—and a father whose struggles have won his son freedoms that eluded Japanese Americans of his generation. As Parkinson’s Disease clouds his memory, Tad sets out to retrieve his story—and in the process discovers his own. The two have made films together, with Robert always by Tad’s side. THIRD ACT is most likely the last.
Third Act Film

L.A. Rebellion in the News