Blackscope Cinema Series: Buck and the Preacher

Creative Alliance’s monthly Blackscope Cinema Series expands our understanding and appreciation of Black film in America. Through varying programming, including talks, demos, and making activities, the Baltimore community is invited to celebrate modern and contemporary film from Black and Diasporic creators.

Featuring a conversation with scholar and commentator Dr. Chad Infante and a desert-themed plant workshop! Stop by the Box Office for discounts on future Blackscope screenings!

About The Film

Buck and the Preacher is a 1972 American Western film released by Columbia Pictures, written by Ernest Kinoy and directed by Sidney Poitier. With his rousingly entertaining directorial debut, Sidney Poitier, alongside actor-producer Harry Belafonte, helped rewrite the history of the western, bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been sorely underrepresented. Combining boisterous buddy comedy with blistering, Black Power-era political fury, Poitier and a marvelously mischievous Belafonte star as a tough and taciturn wagon master and an unscrupulous, pistol-packing “preacher,” who join forces in order to take on the white bounty hunters threatening a westward-bound caravan of people recently emancipated from slavery. A superbly crafted revisionist landmark, Buck and the Preacher subverts Hollywood conventions at every turn and reclaims the western genre in the name of Black liberation. (The Criterion Collection)