Three cheers for the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center (at 17th and Yesler) which is putting on its Third Annual African American Film festival this week, through Sunday.

Three cheers because last night, they screened The Untold Story of Emmett Till, and had the filmmaker, Keith Beauchamp, there for a Q&A. I’ve been dying to see the movie since it caused a stir two years ago after forcing the feds to reopen the Till case. And it was worth it. The film, particularly Beauchamp’s modern interviews with Till’s super-hero-powers mother, is chilling.

If you don’t know the Emmett Till story, it’s widely considered the catalyst of the Civil Rights movement. In 1955, several months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Mamie Mobely Till, the mother of a 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till, made the historic decision to have an open casket funeral so the whole world could see the mangled face of racism, literally. Till was a black teen from Chicago who was brutally murdered after whistling at a white woman while visiting Mississippi. His head was bashed in and his eyes were gouged out of their sockets. The funeral—Till’s disfigured face was published in Jet magazine—and subsequent high-profile trial (the killers were acquitted by an all-white jury) tapped the rising mood of daring civil rights activism among increasing numbers of blacks.

Stranger Film Editor Annie Wagner wrote about the festival in last week’s paper (I’ve linked her write up and recommendations below), but—after attending last night’s inspiring screening—I wanted to give it a shout out of my own, and alert people again that it’s still going on.

Langston Hughes African American Film Festival

Sat April 22—Sun April 30

The Langston Hughes film festival has positively exploded this year. There are a few repeats (Boys of Baraka played at the Varsity for a week last month), but many of the 40-plus films are being screened in Seattle for the first time, from The Paper Trail: 100 Years of the Chicago Defender, a history of the imperiled black daily (Mon at 7 pm, Tues at 4 pm), to an opening gala featuring three locally produced short films (Sat April 22 at 6 pm).

In its nine years of production, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (Tues at 7 pm) made a bigger imprint on the world than just about any agitdoc you could name: The FBI reopened the 50-year-old lynching case based on evidence director Keith Beauchamp had uncovered during his research. The doc gets a little self-congratulatory at the end, what with solemn resolutions being passed by distant city councils and Al Sharpton making vague pronouncements about everything, but the heart of the story, about the 14-year-old kid from Chicago who didn't know any better than to whistle at a white woman in the racist town of Money, Mississippi, couldn't be more intense.

Professional boxing is not a pretty sport, whether it's men or women in the ring. You hear all about bloody noses and bitten ears, and massive brain damage never seems unlikely. But Michele Aboro doesn't look damaged at the beginning of A Knockout (Wed at 7 pm), so it's unclear why she isn't fighting anymore. A skinny, fierce mixed-race woman from South London, she says "somefink" for "something" and she won every one of her 21 professional bouts, 18 of which ended in knockouts. Then you get a look at the top boxer in the sport right now: a gorgeous German bombshell with a yard of blond hair and carefully made-up eyes. Professional sports are for-profit entertainment, and Aboro's promoters apparently decided her high cheekbones and lesbian chic weren't going to cut it. What, had they never heard of the WNBA? ANNIE WAGNER