CANE RIVER

Natchitoches Parish is one of the first free communities of color in Louisiana. A forbidden romance lays bare tensions between two black communities, both descended from slaves but of disparate opportunity—the light-skinned Creoles and the darker-skinned, more disenfranchised families of the area.

Audiences waited more than thirty years to see this mythic film, left to languish in an archive until it was recently restored. Enamored of poetry, the morning sun, and love flourishing against all odds, Horace Jenkins’ look at colorism and class in 1980s Louisiana is a treasure of Black cinema.