Julie Dash launched her career with t “Daughters of the Dust” in 1991 and has made one movie since. Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” made a splash in 1978 but he has struggled to complete a handful of features since then.
Dash’s lyrical fable and Burnett’s tough-minded drama are nothing alike, but they do have one thing in common: Both overlooked filmmakers are Black.
Even getting their debut features into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, which lists just 775 movies of historic and artistic importance, hasn’t made it easier for those two in Hollywood. Only in the past few years have directors such as Regina King (“One Night in Miami,” in theaters now and streaming Friday), Barry Jenkins (the Oscar-winning “Moonlight”), Jordan Peele (“Get Out”) and others begun to chip away at inequities demonstrated by a 2019 study that found that only 6 percent of the movies in the previous 12 years were directed by Black artists. (Sixteen of 2018’s top 100 films were made by Black directors, a high-water mark that doubled the previous peak.)
In other words, it has never been easy for a Black artist to make a career as a director in Hollywood. If their name wasn’t Spike Lee, it was impossible until quite recently — and if the filmmaker was a woman, the situation was even worse. Of the 1,200 movies included in the study, five were made by Black women.