Charles Burnett’s L.A. Rebellion masterpiece is a neorealistic glimpse at a side of the city rarely shown on screen, examining mid-1970s Watts and its mosaic of daily struggles and moments of simple beauty through the eyes of a sensitive slaughterhouse worker while he navigates life, family, and the emotional toll of his monotonous, brutal workplace. Edited, shot, written, produced, and directed by Burnett over the course of multiple years, then submitted as his thesis to the UCLA School of Film in 1977, Killer of Sheep’s legacy and influence has only grown over the subsequent forty years, with the Library of Congress naming it as one of the first fifty films on the National Film Registry and the National Society of Film Critics selecting it as one of the “100 Essential Films” of all time.
