Speaking for a 1991 story titled “They’ve Gotta Have Us” — from a New York Times Magazine issue that featured the aforementioned black filmmakers on its cover — the director Charles Lane was one of many who foresaw permanent change: “The Berlin Wall, having been pulled down, will not be re-erected.”
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But as the decade wore on, a wall was re-erected, black filmmakers now say, and many of the same people who had been held up as the faces of a changing industry watched as their careers ground slowly to a halt.
“I was told that I was in director’s jail,” said Matty Rich, whose emotionally incendiary 1991 debut film, “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Major film studios hailed him as a prodigy. But he’s made only one other film since — in 1994.