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Film: Documentary Banished (2006)

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Director Marco Williams' film, which garnered a documentary nomination at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, is an unsettling tale of American race relations. Williams visits three US towns in which whites expelled their black neighbors by force between the 1860s and 1920s — descendants of the victims, who return with the director to their ancestors' homes, find that the populations' all-white makeup hasn't changed much since then. In interviews with local residents, Williams gleans perspective on the horrific lynchings, beatings, and expulsions that once marked small-town life for many African-Americans. As ethnic cleansing abroad remains a hot topic in 2008, Banished takes us back to a time when virulent bigotry was a national pastime.

– Patricia Courson

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