Who is the Black man?
The Jamaican born filmmaker, Lebert Bethune, who was close to Malcolm X, made two films that deftly explored Black identity at the end of the 1960s.
Still from "Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom" (1967).
Lebert Bethune is a poet, educator, author and filmmaker who became involved in the pan-African expat circles during the 1960s. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, he migrated to the US as a teenager and graduated from NYU. He then traveled to Europe where he studied and worked for a number of years. In Paris during the early 1960s, Bethune became involved in the Black expatriate community. He collaborated with photographer John Taylor, combining his writing with Taylor’s cinematography to create two films, Jojolo (1966) and Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom (1967). Check out our explainer—edited by myself—about Bethune’s life and artistry and watch the full conversation by Matthew J. Smith with Bethune as part of the African Film Festival in New York.
