With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, Sidney Poitier, alongside actor-producer Harry Belafonte, helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power–era political fury, Poitier and a marvelously mischievous Belafonte star as a tough and taciturn wagon master and an unscrupulous, pistol-packing “preacher,” who join forces in order to take on the white bounty hunters threatening a westward-bound caravan of people recently emancipated from slavery. A superbly crafted revisionist landmark, Buck and the Preacher subverts Hollywood conventions at every turn and reclaims the western genre in the name of Black liberation.
Tickets: $15 | FREE for members! Under 25? Get your FREE Bronze membership
Want more? Check out Black Power On Screen, the Watch List series accompanying Is That Black Enough For You?!?.
2023/02/08 - 2023/02/08
Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema
506 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1Y3