AllMovie

The Origins of Film series (a joint project of the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institute) is a presentation of rare American motion pictures from the early days of filmmaking. Part One of the African American Cinema portion of this series is the earliest known surviving feature directed by an African American. Oscar Micheaux's 1919 film, Within Our Gates is directly concerned with racism and includes a scene of a lynching. Discovered in a film archive in Spain in 1970 (retitled as "La Negra" with the English-language intertitles replaced by Spanish ones) the film has been painstakingly restored to approximate Micheaux's original version.