Boots Riley

The World's Fakest News Team tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and pop culture.

Some of this year's most talked about talent open up about the challenges and triumphs of creating critically acclaimed series and performances.

A fearless crew of inventive young women turn shoplifting into a radical act of defiance.

A coming-of-age joyride about Cootie, a 13ft tall young Black man in Oakland, CA. Having grown up hidden away, Cootie soon experiences the beauty and contradictions of the world for the first time. He forms friendships, finds love, navigates awkward situations, and encounters his idol, a real life superhero named The Hero.

The epic story of the actors, writers, directors, and producers who fought for their place on the page, behind the camera and on the screen. From blackface to Black Panther, this series is a definitive chronicle of more than a century of the black experience in Hollywood and a powerful reexamination of a quintessentially American story – in brilliant color.

In an alternate present-day version of Oakland, black telemarketer Cassius Green discovers a magical key to professional success – which propels him into a macabre universe.

Sixty years & a million records ago, Robert Christgau invented Rock music criticism. Anyone who has ever read or written a Pop music review has been influenced by Christgau, who canonized legends from The Ramones to Public Enemy & infuriated icons from Lou Reed to Billy Joel. Now in his eighties, Bob is still at it—amazingly with the same vigor, wit, concision and craft that has defined his expansive career. But in a world where albums are irrelevant, where print is dead & where algorithms have eclipsed critics we are forced to ask: What happens next—for Bob, but also for all music criticism? Is this the end of something? Is Robert Christgau the last critic?

1971 post civil rights San Francisco seemed like the perfect place for a black Korean War veteran and his family to realize their dream of economic independence, and a chance for him to be his own boss. Charlie Walker would soon find out how naive he was. In a city full of impostors and naysayers, he refused to take "No" for an answer. That is, until a catastrophic disaster opened a door that had never been open to a Black man before. This is a story about what happened when he stepped through that door with both feet.

Donya, a lonely Afghan refugee and former translator, spends her twenties drifting through a meager existence in Fremont, California. Shuttling between her job writing fortunes for a fortune cookie factory and sessions with her eccentric therapist, Donya suffers from insomnia and survivor's guilt over those still left behind in Kabul as she desperately searches for love.

William Francome is a fairly typical, white middle-class guy. Typical except for the fact that he is about to embark on a journey into the dark heart of the American judicial system; the tangled world of renowned Death Row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

From neighborhood ciphers to the most notorious MC battles, "Freestyle: the Art of Rhyme" captures the electrifying energy of improvisational hip-hop--the rarely recorded art form of rhyming spontaneously. Like preachers and jazz solos, freestyles exist only in the moment, a modern-day incarnation of the African-American storytelling tradition. Shot over a period of more than seven years, it is already an underground cult film in the hip-hop world. The film systematically debunks the false image put out by record companies that hip-hop culture is violent or money-obsessed. Instead, it lets real hip-hop artists, known and unknown, weave their story out of a passionate mix of language, politics, and spirituality.

Nearly a century after a nuclear holocaust, a new civilization is stumbling its way into the future, and old scraps of pop culture have become the basis for their oral storytelling. A group of survivors share a campfire and begin to piece together the plot of their bizarre sacred text – a story known to their ancestors as The Simpsons episode “Cape Feare”.

This award winning documentary, narrated by Lou Reed, explores the breadth and depth of Occupy Wall Street and how it quickly grew from a small park in lower Manhattan to an international movement. The film highlights why people from diverse age, ethnic and financial backgrounds support the movement and its focus of removing money from politics in order to reclaim democracy from entrenched corporate interests so that critical issues including job creation, affordable access to health and education, protecting the environment and gun safety can be fully addressed. Featuring interviews with a wide range of subjects including Occupiers, economist Jeffrey Sachs and business magnate Russell Simmons.

The Dope wakes up after his victory, but now the leader of The Martial Art Mafia is out for revenge... and he's got a new trick up his sleeve!

FIRST EARTH is a documentary about the movement towards a massive paradigm shift for shelter - building healthy houses in the old ways, out of the very earth itself, and living together like in the old days, by recreating villages. An audiovisual manifesto filmed over the course of 4 years and 4 continents, FIRST EARTH makes the case that earthen homes are the healthiest housing in the world; and that since it still takes a village to raise a healthy child, it is incumbent upon us to transform our suburban sprawl into eco-villages, a new North American dream.

We choose to build with one another in a shoulder to shoulder struggle against state-sanctioned violence. A violence that is manifest in the speed of bullets and batons and tear gas that pierce our bodies. One that is latent in the edifice of law and concrete that work together to, physically and figuratively, cage us. We choose to join one another in resistance not because our struggles are the same but because we each struggle against the formidable forces of structural racism and the carceral and lethal technologies deployed to maintain them. This video intends to interrupt that process – to assert our humanity – and to stand together in an affirmation of life and a commitment to resistance. From Ferguson to Gaza, from Baltimore to Jerusalem, from Charleston to Bethlehem, we will be free.

The Coup is one of the most notoriously political groups in the history of rap music. This DVD features music videos and interviews with Boots Riley and DJ Pam the Funkstress.

Set in the early 1990’s of San Jose and Asmara, a family prepares to leave the US for Eritrea during the formative years of their country’s newly won independence. Everyone is an alien in navigating a free Eritrea— the diaspora moving back home, the citizens who never left, and the aliens from outer space who picked a strange and beautiful time to make contact.