DIVIDED WE FALL

HE STORY OF THIRD WORLD CINEMA CORPORATION—A fledgling production house founded by Black and Latino artists in 1971—is at once inspirational and heartbreaking. An earnest “for us, by us” effort to tell stories the studios would have never picked up, the company staffed its productions with people who had been or would have been systemically kept outside studio gates. Throughout most of Hollywood’s first century, few studios had produced Black- and Latino-centric movies, claiming they were risky or not of interest to general audiences. From the silent era through the 1950s, segregated theaters created an independent market for movies by Black filmmakers for Black audiences, and later, new independent filmmaking efforts arose with the cultural upheaval of