For this year’s Cinema’s Legacy program, AFI invited film scholar Racquel Gates to curate a collection of four films that reframes the notion of “classic” through a Black perspective. The program asks viewers to rethink the relationship between blackness and broader cinematic concepts, treating the very idea of “Cinema’s Legacy” as an open-ended question rather than a self-evident statement. Employing the notion of classic film genres and grounded in the 1990s – a period of unprecedented Black film production – this year’s selections are a snapshot of the immense variety of Black films from that era: DEAD PRESIDENTS (heist film), JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE I.R.T. (coming of-age), POSSE (the western) and THE WATERMELON WOMAN (romantic comedy).