Born in 1950 in Texas, he is one of the most renowned cinema directors and producers associated with the L.A. Rebellion movement, also known as Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers: a generation of filmmakers from the 60s to the 80s of UCLA, creators of a revolutionary Black Cinema diverging from Hollywood conventions and attentive to the real african-american lived experiences.
Woodberry moved to California in 1967, where he completed an undergraduate program in Pan-African studies and a master in Latin-American Studies strongly reliant on documentary films for portraying the countries’ social panorama. In tune with the magnitude of the Civil Rights Movement and the advocacy for Black Power, the filmmaker developed a deep socio-political consciousness. In the 70s and thanks to The students’ insistence towards a more open university - for black, middle-eastern, south-american and female students at UCLA - allowed the university’s resources to finally give voice to previously silenced experiences.
His movie Bless Their Little Hearts (1983) has been praised for its intimate realism and honest portrait of the individual demotivation and domestic frustration within an African-american working class family. With Charles Burnett as its cinematographer and screenwriter, the film was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress in the north-American National Film Registry and awarded at the Berlinale in 1984. It has been associated to Third Cinema: a revolutionary movement in its re-imagining of post-colonial power structure particularly in areas derivatively named of third world, pushing towards a realistic and sensitive representativity against Hollywood’s stylised imagery.
His filmography also includes the short film Pocketbook (1980) based on Langston Hughes’ short story Thank You, Ma’am, and When I Die I Won’t Stay Dead (2015) about the life and work of the african-american poet Bob Kaufman - both testimonies to the afro-american ways of expression as a means to translate lived experience. Recently, Woodberry also directed Marseille Aprés La Guerre (2016) and A Story from Africa (2019), with a bigger focus on the consequences of European colonialism.
Woodberry’s films have already been screened in Cannes, MoMA, Camera Austria Symposium, Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou. But beyond filmmaking he has also been a teacher of Film/Video at the California Institute of Arts, since 1989. Keeping a tight bond with his colleagues, he took part in When It Rains (Charles Burnett,1995) and contributed by narrating Red Hollywood (Thom Andersen, 1996) and Four Corners (James Benning, 1998).