introduction

I am a high-school senior at H B Woodlawn. Every year, seniors at my school get a three week block of time designated for "senior projects". A senior project is supposed to me a time where as a senior you can pursue and study something that interests you outside of what you would be otherwise learning in school. After a little bit of thinking about what interests me and what i would like to learn more about or at least study more I came up with something: film. I am a big movie buff and an avid film watcher and I have more of an interest in film as a method of storytelling than most other things. So at this point I had the broad topic of film. I got to thinking about what movies I would want to watch and write about and a lot of the great movies I have seen that came to mind were about race. Race relations, racism and the cultural implications of race are some of the heaviest topics regularly displayed on the big screen. Once I had gotten to this point in my senior project decision making I decided i needed a little more focus to my project and decided to focus on blacks in America.
Over the next 21 days I will be watching 21 movies about blacks in America. The movies come in all genres and all across the spectrum of seriousness, but they all focus on the history and culture of blacks in America. The list of movies i have developed also spans over about one hundred years and I plan to watch in chronological order. The first movie I will watch, which I plan to post a response to later today, is The Birth of a Nation.