Stream Films from Third World Newsreel with Your Library Card

One of the joys of working at The New York Public Library is witnessing the perennial usefulness of materials in our collections. This is the case with the films made by Third World Newsreel. Started in 1968, Third World Newsreel (TWN) is a media arts organization that facilitates the production and distribution of films by marginalized communities. The New York Public Library bought its first film from TWN—an actual film reel, which we still have in the Reserve Film and Video Collection—in its inaugural year: Struggle for Life is a film about the Vietnam War, told through the eyes of the medical workers in South Vietnam. Since then, TWN has released films on topics such as environmental racism, redlining in the Bronx, the nail care industry, the foster care system, AIDS activism, and immigrant riders of the #7 subway line. The through line in all TWN films is that you will hear about social issues directly from everyday people living that experience, and this makes their works an important part of literacy development.

Now, thanks to the Library's continued partnership with TWN, you can stream the entire film catalog for free with your library card. Don't have a New York Public Library card? Apply for a card online or in person at one of our locations.

Explore Third World Newsreel and Start Streaming

Not sure where to start? Here are a handful of my favorite films in the streaming collection:

A Litany For Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde, Black feminist/poet/scholar/librarian, was a multi-hyphenate achiever everyone should get to know. In fact, you have likely already encountered accessories, motivational posters, and coffee mugs adorned with her exquisite quotes, about self-care or being deliberate and unafraid.  This documentary features Lorde discussing her experience of being lesbian and Black in New York in the 1950s as well as her social and political activity.

El Pueblo se Levanta (The People are Rising)

Literacy is the ability to take into account a variety of perspectives in order to form an objective opinion, and what better way to consider poverty and oppression in East Harlem in the late 1960s than to hear from the people experiencing that oppression? This film is an intimate look at the Young Lords as a community group using direct action to combat social injustice.

Janie's Janie

You cannot talk about the emergence of Direct Cinema as a documentary style or second-wave feminism and "consciousness" without pointing to Janie's Janie and its inimitable subject. Janie, a mother of five with a distinctive New Jersey accent proudly working to make ends meet as a single parent, delivers one of the best zingers in nonfiction filmmaking history: "Before, I was my father's Janie; then Charlie's Janie; now I'm Janie's Janie."  

Childcare: People's Liberation

If one considers Janie's Janie a sophisticated older sister within the feminist film canon, this scrappy little film is the spitfire baby of the family. Made in 1970 by two women learning filmmaking as they went along—and developing the footage themselves at the lab—what this work lacks in polished production technique it more than makes up for in honesty about the trials and tribulations parents, especially mothers, face when they are without affordable childcare. Come for the exhausted moms chainsmoking on park benches, stay for the we-opened-our-own-childcare-co-op plot twist.  

Take Your Bags

I consider this film a paragon of independent filmmaking. I think it's safe to say that Camille Billops did not care about conforming to anyone else's perception of what a film should or should not be, or how a filmmaker should or should not address an issue through the film medium. In this work, Billops films herself sitting companionably with a young child, discussing slavery, the appropriation of Black imagery and the theft of cultural memory. Billops employs primary documents to support her conversation, the way Ken Burns might, but her storytelling style and the cadence of her voice is reminiscent of the legacy of Black storytelling in America. At the end, they sing the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" together.

The Case Against Lincoln Center

I am fascinated by urban planning. We have several excellent films on the subject in the Reserve Film and Video Collection. But there are not so many films which directly address the impact city design— or redesign—has on the people living there. Yes, Steven Spielberg admirably incorporated the destruction of the San Juan Hill neighborhood as a plot point in his version of West Side Story. But how cool would it be if a film existed that was made by the residents of San Juan Hill, documenting the neighborhood and its seizure by eminent domain? This film is a witness to and defendant of the neighborhood, which was earmarked a "slum" by chairman of the Committee on Slum Clearance, Robert Moses, and cleared to make room for Lincoln Center.