We lost one of cinema’s great innovators and personalities this fall when Melvin van Peebles passed away. Van Peebles was a pioneering Black artist and intellectual who never took “no” for an answer. For the incendiary SWEETBACK, Van Peebles serves as producer, director, writer, composer, editor, and star to tell the saga of Sweetback, a sex-show performer who is pushed too far by a pair of racist cops and goes on a kill-or-be-killed quest for liberation from white oppression.