UCLA School of Film and Television

Director Melvonna Ballenger’s Rain (Nyesha) shows how awareness can lead to a more fulfilling life. In the film, a female typist goes from apathetic to empowered through the help of a man giving out political fliers on the street. Using John Coltrane’s song “After the Rain,” Ballenger’s narration of the film meditates on rainy days and their impact. The rain in this short film doesn’t signify defeat, but offers renewal and “a chance to recollect, a cool out.”

Depicts one woman's struggle with the responsibility of juggling two jobs at one time as both a garage mechanic and God's chosen messiah. She faces a rather difficult career decision as her true passion is in the first job while her effectiveness in the second job grows more questionable.

A former cop works in purgatory and processes people going to heaven and hell. One day, his 20 year old son appears.

When Cassandra witnesses a drunken encounter between her friend and her roommate, she is compelled to investigate if it was consensual.

Emmy-winning documentary by a UCLA student concerning undocumented Mexican workers' struggle on a flower farm in Northern California. The documentary traces the worker's struggle at Año Nuevo flower farm, who were denied proper housing, denied pay, and extorted by the flower farm owner, and their attempt to bring a civil lawsuit against him. Footage includes interviews with dozens of Año Nuevo workers and main organizers, lawyers representing the group, local and state employees, and the owner of Año Nuevo farm. The documentary weaves in a history of Mexican immigration to the U.S., the struggles associated with crossing the border, the economic history of Mexico, and the crisis of transnational production in Mexico, displacing access to food staples. Following the bureaucratic state involvement with Año Nuevo Housing department and wage violations, workers organized from 1977-1979 to bring civil suit against their employer.

Lana Wilson has trouble in school because of racist discrimination, but at first, her parents don't believe her.

An early student work directed at UCLA by Alile Sharon Larkin and submitted as her "Project One." Larkin visualizes a mental ward as a possible equivalent to prison incarceration for women of color. –UCLA Film & Television Archive

A woman remembers an unwanted teenage pregnancy.

Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” Filmed in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey by activist-turned-filmmaker Bernard Nicolas as his first project at UCLA, this short film poetically envisions the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide an escape from workplace indignities. —Allyson Nadia Field

Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world.

Ben Caldwell’s Medea, a collage piece made on an animation stand and edited entirely in the camera, combines live action and rapidly edited still images of Africans and African Americans which function like flashes of history that the unborn child will inherit. Caldwell invokes Amiri Baraka’s poem “Part of the Doctrine” in this experimental meditation on art history, Black imagery, identity and heritage.

A man is trying to decide if he should go to Vietnam with the US army.

With immigration forces in pursuit, Mary, an illegal foreign worker living in Israel, must decide between uprooting her son from the only place he calls home or risk being deported.

A Black farming family struggles to find its identity and maintain its integrity when the younger of two brothers decides to sell his part of the farm and go to law school. This goes against what the older brother values in life. The older brother's wife acts as reconciler between the two brothers.

A night watchman at a shuttered, dimly lit factory runs into a bum who used to be a preacher that is trying to sleep away from the thunderstorm, but when the watchman kicks him out, the watchman gets cursed.

Presents the story of a relationship between the haunted son of Holocaust survivors and a gentile woman

It is the story of a pacifist of the 60s, who, after living as a deserter for twelve years, decides to hand himself over to the authorities and face a legitimate political trial. Surprisingly, he discovers that no one cares who he is and what he has done. Emerging from his dirty basement, Leon realizes that the FBI has stopped looking for him and that President Carter has granted an amnesty. The old companions have become employees, their only "commitment" is now the family. The students of the universities refuse any political appeal. During an incredible party, given in his honor, Leon accuses his old friends of having stopped worrying, they tell him that life is much more complex than they believed in their youth. Having cut his hair, Leon also looks for a job. What he will be able to find, however, is the surprise of the last lines of the film.

An educational music film promoting the values of UCLA.

A lucid view on an extraordinary character, recognized and loved or reviled by the crowd of wrestling fans. Cassandro, the exotic gay lucha libre fighter.

When an aged man feels the need to confess to the new catholic priest, his gay lover of many years is hurt and upset.