Haile Gerima’s BUSH MAMA (1979)

As part of PRS's YesterdayLA 2026 series—a month-long exploration of the people, places, and works of art that have become part of the fabric of our city's history—7th House is proud to present a rare theatrical screening of Haile Gerima's BUSH MAMA, one of the foundational works of the L.A. Rebellion and among the most powerful, underseen portraits of a Los Angeles rarely represented on our screens with such immediacy and humanity.

From its opening real-life footage of the LAPD harassing the director and his crew during filming, Bush Mama establishes itself as a bracing work of radical cinema and a searing portrait of Los Angeles rarely seen on screen—the Watts neighborhoods shaped by poverty, state surveillance, and the everyday struggles of Black Angelenos only a few miles from Hollywood, yet worlds away from its fantasies. Featuring a magnetic lead performance by Barbara O. Jones (Daughters of the Dust), Gerima's debut narrative feature follows Dorothy, a pregnant young mother whose life is upended when her partner, Vietnam veteran T.C. (Johnny Weathers), is wrongfully imprisoned on the eve of a promising job opportunity. Left to raise her young daughter alone and navigate the welfare system, Dorothy's relentless struggles with poverty, bureaucracy, and police violence become the catalyst for a profound political awakening, transforming her from a woman worn down by circumstance into one whose newfound political consciousness awakens her to her own agency and self-worth.

With its fractured chronology, rapid flashbacks, and dense collage of voices, sirens, police radios, helicopters, songs, and visions, Bush Mama feels less like a narrative than a visceral immersion in Dorothy's inner and outer worlds as she traverses a ragged path from helplessness to hope. Blending narrative fiction, dreamlike surrealism, documentary immediacy, and bold formal experimentation, it is at once a work of righteous fury and deep humanity—an uncompromising exploration of oppression, resistance, and self-realization.

A key figure of the L.A. Rebellion—the influential movement of Black filmmakers, including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Larry Clark, which emerged from UCLA in the 1970s—Gerima transformed his experiences in Los Angeles into a cinema of extraordinary urgency and invention. And nearly fifty years after its completion, Bush Mama remains both a landmark of independent American cinema and a work of astonishing formal and political vitality, its righteous fury and hard-won hope just as urgent today as they were in 1979.years

Dir. Haile Gerima, 1979, 97 mins, United States, English, Unrated, Digital

Tickets: $10 (All Screenings Are In Person Only)

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.