Film Screening | In Collaboration with Bootleg Griot Friday, 29 May 2026 Rekord Gallery, Dubai United Arab Emirates
Efie Gallery and Bootleg Griot present a monthly film programme in the Rekord Gallery tracing the intertwined histories of African and Arab liberation cinema. Through a carefully considered selection of films, the series reflects on how sound and image have shaped political consciousness, cultural memory, and diasporic imagination across continents.
Killer of Sheep (1978 · Directed by Charles Burnett)
About the film
Widely regarded as one of the defining masterpieces of American cinema, Killer of Sheep is a quietly profound portrait of life in Watts, Los Angeles. Centred on Stan, a slaughterhouse worker navigating exhaustion, tenderness, and economic precarity, the film unfolds through a series of deeply human moments that reveal the emotional texture of everyday life.
Made as Burnett's UCLA thesis film and produced outside the structures of Hollywood, Killer of Sheep radically expanded the possibilities of cinematic language itself. Rejecting spectacle in favour of intimacy and observation, Burnett created a work of extraordinary lyricism, shaped by memory, labour, music, and the fragile rhythms of ordinary existence. Its neorealist sensibility and poetic visual structure have influenced generations of filmmakers and secured its place within the canon of world cinema.
