POSSE Cinema's Legacy

Following the film, film scholar and Cinema’s Legacy guest curator Racquel Gates leads a conversation with Michael B. Gillespie, Hannah Giorgis and Terri Francis.

A band of Buffalo Soldiers are sent on a suicide mission to Cuba in 1898 to intercept a shipment of gold during the Spanish-American War. The African American unit is betrayed by a racist and corrupt white colonel. The group, led by Jessie Lee (Mario Van Peebles), escapes with the cache of gold and must avoid capture and shoot their way to freedom on a perilous adventure across the American frontier. Along the way, Jessie Lee avenges the lynching of his preacher father. Told in flashback, this ambitious western re-imagines and reclaims American history by focusing on the forgotten Black cowboys of the American West. Van Peebles directs as well as stars in this entertaining 1993 revisionist western. The large ensemble cast includes Woody Strode, Pam Grier, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Blair Underwood, Isaac Hayes, Billy Zane and Tone Loc.