AUDIO: Restored 'Race Films' Find New Audiences

[Ryan Goble]

Important work / story from NPR...

It's nearly impossible to see some of the earliest movies by African-American filmmakers. Many have been lost or destroyed. Those that have survived are often held by private collectors or stored away in old film archives.

More than a dozen of those movies, though, are now part of a film restoration project — Pioneers of African-American Cinema — by independent film distributor Kino Lorber.

The project focuses on a genre called "race films" — movies made after World War I and through the 1940s by black filmmakers with mostly black casts for black audiences. These films tried to uplift the image of African-Americans and contradict the racist stereotypes in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a blockbuster after its release in 1915.

 Listen to the whole STORY HERE.