The Annihilation of Fish

Charles Burnett is a critically-acclaimed filmmaker whose work has been praised for its depictions of the African-American experience. Growing up in South-Central Los Angeles, he has revealed “it wasn’t a nurturing environment." After seeing how the Vietnam War decimated his community, he pursued education. While studying film at UCLA, he found himself in an environment that bred creativity and originality. For his thesis film, he completed “Killer of Sheep,” his first feature film, which was selected by the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 1990 as a work that is “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” and won the New York Critics Circle Award 2007 after its restoration and rerelease. His second feature, “My Brother’s Wedding” (1983) was screened at film festivals, but Burnett's third film, “To Sleep with Anger,”(1990) was his widest release to date and received positive reviews. He continued his work with “The Glass Shield” (1994) and short films that include “The Final Insult” and “When it Rains,” the latter being named one of the 10 best films of the 1990s by the Chicago Reader. In 1998, Burnett received the highly prestigious MacArthur Fellowship “Genius” Award. As a filmmaker, he has been hailed as having a voice that is richly unique. Recently, with the help of multiple organizations, his 1999 film “Annihilation of Fish” that had been in limbo for decades, was restored with its original material to finally be released. In 2017, Burnett received an Oscar for his lifetime achievement of work in film.