ASTORIA, NY.- As our country celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the United States, Museum of the Moving Image will present the screening series By the People, For the People: Real American Tales, May 29 through July 5, featuring films that take on the perspective of the nation’s historically marginalized and less frequently represented on screen. From films about collective labor and the underclass as explored in The Grapes of Wrath, Matewan, and Days of Heaven, to immigrant communities in The Exiles and Los Sures, and the disenfranchised in films such as Nothing but a Man and Buddies, these films ask what the term “American cinema” means—and what it perhaps could mean in an ideal world.

Additional titles may be added as they are confirmed.

The full schedule for By the People, For the People: Real American Tales is included below

‘BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE: REAL AMERICAN TALES,’ MAY 29–JULY 5, 2026
All screenings take place at Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria, NY 11106 in the Sumner M. Redstone Theater or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room. Advance tickets available online at movingimage.org.

Matewan
Friday, May 29, 7:00 p.m.
Dir. John Sayles, 1987, 135 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Chris Cooper, Mary McDonnell, Will Oldham, James Earl Jones, David Strathairn, Ken Jenkins. An essential work of labor cinema, John Sayles’s remarkable and gripping Matewan brought a forgotten and bloody chapter of American history to vivid life and was one of the independent breakthrough hits of the eighties. Set in Appalachian coal country in 1920s West Virginia, the film follows a group of miners as they fight to unite as workers, led by strike organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) and opposed by the violent efforts of the local coal company. Passionately performed and beautifully shot by Haskell Wexler, who received an Academy Award nomination for his work, Matewan is a benchmark in cinematic representations of the American unionization and one of John Sayles’s greatest works.

The Grapes of Wrath
Saturday, May 30, 12:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 31, 12:30 p.m.
Dir. John Ford. 1940, 129 mins. U.S. DCP. With Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin, Dorris Bowdon. One of John Ford’s most enduring classics, this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s classic novel about Depression-era Okies on the road to California won Ford his second of four Best Director Oscars. Expressively shot with in black-and-white with poetic plaintiveness by the great cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) and featuring indelible performances by Henry Fonda as the embodiment of worn decency Tom Joad and an Oscar-winning Jane Darwell as his persistent Ma, The Grapes of Wrath is a film of uncommon grace and beauty, and, especially for Golden Age Hollywood, remarkable realism.

Killer of Sheep
Saturday, May 30, 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, May 31, 4:45 p.m.
Dir. Charles Burnett. 1977, 83 mins. U.S. DCP. With Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is a poetically rendered narrative that follows Stan (Henry G. Sanders), who is employed at the slaughterhouse and suffering from the emotional side effects of his bloody occupation. An impressionistic portrait of a Black family man eaten up by life’s financial burdens, fighting to save his soul and support his family in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood, Killer of Sheep is an aesthetic triumph, touched as much by tenderness as frustration, and fueled by the internal emotional rhythms of all its characters, from Stan to his wife (Kaycee Moore) to their free-spirited kids. Director Burnett also wrote, shot, and edited this American masterpiece, the most widely celebrated film of the fabled “L.A. Rebellion” of Black filmmakers revolutionizing cinema in the seventies.

The Exiles
Sunday, May 31, 3:00 p.m.
Dir. Kent Mackenzie. 1961, 72 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, Tommy Reynolds, Rico Rodriguez. Unlike any other American film, director Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles is one of the great Los Angeles films, mixing documentary and fiction in its pursuit to represent the lives of Indigenous people who are living in the downtown section of the city known as Bunker Hill, after having been displaced from their reservation. Finding creative, unusual ways to film architectural landscapes and his subject’s faces, Mackenzie creates a work of singular minimalism, eschewing melodrama for a vibrant, compassionate realism. Refusing to construct a portrait of melancholy outsiders, the director instead shows his subjects as part of the city’s nightlife and culture.

Nothing but a Man
Saturday, June 6, 1:00 p.m.
Friday, June 19, 1:00 p.m.
Dir. Michael Roemer. 1964, 95 mins. U.S. 35mm. A Cinema Conservancy Release of a Cinedigm/New Video Film. Restored by Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation. With Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius Harris. One of the very finest American films of the 1960s, this masterpiece of independent cinema by Michael Roemer is a painfully honest, enormously moving drama about Black life in the South, featuring superb performances by Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln as a railroad worker and a preacher’s daughter falling in love and struggling to make ends meet. Visually, Roemer’s film, shot in claustrophobic full-frame (1.33:1) and filled with gorgeous, compassionate close-ups, reflects the constricting social environment its characters live in.

The Queen
Saturday, June 6, 3:00 p.m.
Dir. Frank Simon. 1968, 68 mins. U.S. DCP. With Jim Dine, Jack Doroshow, Bruce Jay Friedman, Bernard Giquel. More than 40 years before RuPaul's Drag Race, this groundbreaking documentary about the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant introduced audiences to the world of competitive drag. The film takes us backstage with the contestants as they rehearse, throw shade, and transform into their drag personas in the lead-up to the big event. Organized by LGBTQ icon and artist Flawless Sabrina, the competition boasted a star-studded panel of judges including Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Terry Southern. But perhaps most memorable is an epic diatribe calling out the pageant's biases delivered by Crystal LaBeija, who would go on to form the influential House of Beija, heavily featured in Paris Is Burning. A vibrant piece of queer history, The Queen can now be seen in full resplendence thanks to a recent restoration from the original camera negative.

Days of Heaven
Sunday, June 7, 12:30 p.m.
Saturday, June 13, 6:00 p.m.
Dir. Terrence Malick. 1978, 94 mins. DCP. With Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz. A gloriously realized evocation of turn-of-the-century America as lived by itinerant laborers in the wheat fields of the Texas panhandle, Days of Heaven, much like Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane or The Godfather films before it, is that rare thing in Hollywood cinema—a genuine milestone that redefined how film might give access to the historical past, while establishing new roots in the twin traditions of American literature and philosophy. It is also a romantic tragedy viewed from the perspective of a child, as idiosyncratically personal and regionally specific as it is indescribably beautiful. Legendary cinematographer Néstor Almendros was justly awarded an Academy Award for his work on this film.

Chan Is Missing
Sunday, June 7, 3:00 p.m.
Dir. Wayne Wang. 1982, 80 mins. U.S. DCP. With Wood Moy, Marc Hayashi, Laureen Chew, Peter Wang. The legendary filmmaker Wayne Wang (who would go on to make The Joy Luck Club and Smoke) exploded onto a burgeoning American independent film scene with his low-budget landmark, a light-hearted, inventive comic mystery that reapplies film noir conventions to an unconventional cinematic milieu: the immigrant population of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Made with a $20,000 budget and eschewing cultural stereotypes, Chan Is Missing follows a taxi driver (Wood Moy) and his nephew (Marc Hayashi) as they search for their business partner, Chan, who has disappeared, along with the money they had relied upon to secure their cab license. With its good-natured characters, compelling cast, and innovative approach to on-the-street filmmaking, Chan Is Missing is a delightful breakthrough that heralded a storied career.

Born in Flames
Sunday, June 14, 12:30 p.m.
Dir. Lizzie Borden. 1983, 80 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Honey, Adele Bertei, Jeanne Satterfield, Hillary Hurst, Sheila McLaughlin, Pat Murphy, Marty Pottenger. Lizzie Borden’s kickass feminist, queer dystopia is one of the most fearless and inventive American indies ever made, a postpunk missive that rejects complacency and political compromise. At its thrumming center is a group of working-class women rebels who oppose society’s sexism, homophobia, classism, and racism, which persist despite the fact that they live in a supposed post-revolutionary utopia. Guerilla-style filmmaking at its best, the New York–shot Born in Flames is a film of radical commitment and visual intensity.

Buddies
Sunday, June 14, 2:30 p.m.
Dir. Arthur J. Bressan Jr. 1985, 81 mins. U.S. DCP. With Geoff Edholm, David Schachter. The first American theatrical release to deal with the ongoing AIDS crisis head-on, this stringently made yet profoundly moving low-budget independent production from the gay trailblazer Arthur J. Bressan Jr. (Gay USA) follows the burgeoning friendship between hospitalized AIDS patient Robert (Geoff Edholm) and David (David Schachter), the volunteer “buddy” from a local gay help center assigned to look after him. Yet Bressan’s film is not just a simple tale of caregiving, but a work of political anger: the men’s relationship also becomes a dialectical battle of wills between complacency and activism. Produced for around $27,000, the film is an unforgettable document of a time in which gay men were abandoned by their government, made all the more poignant by the fact that both Bressan and star Schachter would die from AIDS complications before the end of the decade.

The Crowd
Featuring live piano accompaniment by Makia Matsumura
Sunday, June 14, 3:00 p.m.
Dir. King Vidor. 1928, 98 mins. U.S. 35mm. Silent with live piano accompaniment. With James Murray, Eleanor Boardman. One of the greatest of all silent films, King Vidor’s masterpiece captures life in fast-paced 1920s New York City from the perspective of an “average” Joe that the camera just happens to pick right out of the crowd. A work of thrilling proletariat melodrama, featuring some of the most remarkable camerawork committed to celluloid, The Crowd is a depiction of economic and domestic struggle right on the cusp of the Great Depression, as well as a vital depiction of the exuberant stampede of the city itself—its joys, its disappointments, its dreams and realities. Also part of the series Silents, Please!

Do the Right Thing
Friday, June 19, 6:30 p.m.
Saturday, June 20, 3:30 p.m.
Dir. Spike Lee. 1989, 120 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Rosie Perez, John Turturro. One of the most aesthetically accomplished and intentionally incendiary American films ever made, Spike Lee’s full-throttle portrait of a particularly eventful, hot summer day in the life of a Bed-Stuy neighborhood is a remarkable and ambivalent dramatization of race relations in America. The phenomenal cast (including Aiello as pizza man Sal, Lee as delivery boy Mookie, and Davis as an apartment-stoop prophet), the endlessly inventive visuals, and the charged political discussion made this an epochal cultural moment when it was released in summer 1989, and it easily retains its power to this day.

Los Sures
Sunday, June 21, 2:00 p.m.
Dir. Diego Echeverria. 1984, 60 mins. U.S. DCP. This incredible time capsule of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, circa 1984, is a documentary ode to a neighborhood pre-gentrification, a landscape of graffiti, breakdancing, boom boxes, and small business storefronts before corporate developers took over. Both joyful and sobering, Los Sures, shot on 16mm, takes a fly-on-the-wall approach to its subjects, following five residents of the largely Puerto Rican and Dominican communities as they go about their day, wonder about their future, run businesses or live on welfare to support their families. Acknowledging economic challenges, simmering racial tensions, and poverty while celebrating their culture and creativity. Diego Echeverria’s film inspired an ongoing historical project at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, titled Living Los Sures, and continues to be an inspiration.

Salt of the Earth
Sunday, July 5, 12:30 p.m.
Dir. Herbert Biberman. 1954, 94 mins. U.S. DCP. With Rosaura Revueltas, Will Geer, David Wolfe, Mervin Williams. Made by the blacklisted trio of writer Michael Wilson, producer Paul Jarrico, and director Herbert J. Biberman, Salt of the Earth is a seminal masterpiece of labor solidarity and immigrant uprising. Using actual miners and their families, many of them Mexican American—including a cadre of inspiring women at the center of it all—the film is a neorealist vision of one strike in one small mining community, the ominously named Zinc Town, New Mexico. A tale of struggle and triumph, Salt of the Earth is at once an essential historical document and a surprisingly relevant political allegory.