Introduced by guest curator Mia Mask

Dir. Sidney Poitier. 1972, 102 mins. 35mm. With Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee. Poitier made his remarkably assured directorial debut with this rollicking revisionist western. He stars alongside Harry Belafonte as, respectively, a wagon master and a shiftless preacher who join forces to protect a band of freed slaves from white bounty hunters. Marrying a black power message to the form of a classical western, Buck and the Preacher is one of the first films to explore the African-American experience in the post-Civil War West. Jazz legend Benny Carter wrote the unique score, which is performed by blues greats Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Don Frank Brooks. 

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