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Bless Their Little Hearts

Director in Person
Screening on Film
Directed by Billy Woodberry.
With Nate Hardman, Kaycee Moore, Angela Burnett.
US, 1984, 35mm, black & white, 84 min.
Print source: UCLA

Billy Woodberry's powerful Bless Their Little Hearts is recognized not only as a landmark in African American cinema but as one of the great US independent films of the 1980s. Originally scheduled for the opening night of this spring’s program L.A. Rebellion: Creating a Black Cinema, organized by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the theater had to close that day due to the search for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. We are pleased to welcome Billy Woodberry back to Harvard to present his work. — David Pendleton

The neo-realist strain of L.A. Rebellion filmmaking began with Charles Burnett’s first films in the late 1960s and reached its culmination with Bless Their Little Hearts fifteen years later. Working from a screenplay by Burnett, Billy Woodberry brings to anguished life this portrait of a married couple striving to make ends meet and still have the time and energy to maintain their relationship to each other and to their three young children. The result is an emotional and strikingly realistic look at the daily grind of working poverty, full of humor and devoid of the least pity for its characters—or of a simple solution to their difficulties.

00:00 / 00:00
      Bless Their Little Hearts introduction and post-screening discussion with Billy Woodberry and David Pendleton.

      PRECEDED BY

      • The Pocketbook

        Directed by Billy Woodberry.
        With Ella “Simi” Nelson, Ray Cherry, David Jenkins.
        US, 1980, 35mm, black & white, 13 min.
        Print source: UCLA

      In the course of a botched purse snatching, a boy questions the course of his life in this adaptation of Langston Hughes’ short story, "Thank You, Ma'am." 

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