Sidney Poitier & His Trailblazing Contemporaries, a four-week, 48-film festival paying tribute to both the late actor and lesser-known actors of his own generation, will run at Film Forum from April 1 through April 28.

The series, originally planned for 2020 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Poitier’s film debut (in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out), includes Poitier classics like In the Heat of the Night, The Defiant Ones, Raisin in the Sun, Blackboard Jungle, A Patch of Blue, Paris Blues, and many others, along with films featuring contemporaries like James Edwards, Juano Hernandez, Canada Lee, Frederick O’Neal, Ivan Dixon, Frank Silvera, Brock Peters, William Marshall, and many others. The series is a sequel to Film Forum’s 2019 Black Women festival.

The first major Black male movie star of his generation and the first to win an Oscar for Best Actor (for Lilies of the Field), Sidney Poitier (1927-2022) had a career (that included directing) spanning six decades. But there was little room for other Black stars in 1950s and ‘60s Hollywood. Poitier’s enormous popularity paved the way for the Black actors who followed him, though, with perhaps the exception of Harry Belafonte (a super-star in his own right), the actors of his own generation had fewer opportunities.

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