DAY OF BLACK DOCS is the signature annual event for the Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers West (BADWest). The mini film festival is a celebration of documentaries that center the Black experience, both behind and in front of the camera. The event features sensational documentaries that amplify Black stories from an impactful point of view.
Moderator
Tim Cogshell
Tim is a veteran film critic and journalist with over 30 years of experience working for national print, broadcast, and internet-based media concerns, including NPR, KNBC, Spectrum News, ABC 7, Box Office Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Alt-Film Guide, among others. He's a regular on NPR affiliate KPCC's FilmWeek with Larry Mantle and co-host of the CineGods podcast.
Saturday Film Schedule
12:00 PM - 6:30PM PST
12:00PM
BADWEST WELCOME
BLOCK 1
12:06PM
FREE JOAN LITTLE (short)
Q&A with Director
Yoruba Richen
12:54PM
THE EYES OF GHANA
Q&A with Director
Ben Proudfoot
BREAK
BLOCK 2
3:02PM
TRESPASS
Q&A w/ Director
Kim Walton
4:22 PM
A BETTER WAY: JAMES LAWSON, ARCHITECT OF NON-VIOLENCE
Q&A w/ Director and Producer
Karen Hayes and Steve Williams
PANELISTS SUBJECT TO CHANGE
The Films
TRESPASS
63mins
Kim Watson
Based on his award-winning book, TRESPASS: Portraits of Unhoused Life, Love and Understanding, TRESPASS, the documentary, brings viewers face-to-face with the unhoused of Los Angeles, revealing lives shaped by loss, resilience, and survival. Through deeply personal encounters and unguarded storytelling, filmmaker Kim Watson captures the humanity often unseen by the public’s passing gaze. The film challenges audiences to move beyond stereotypes, reframing homelessness not as a condition, but as a shared human reality that demands empathy, dignity, and collective action.
FREE JOAN LITTLE
36 mins
Yoruba Richen
FREE JOAN LITTLE tells the story of the landmark 1975 murder trial of the first woman in U.S. history to be acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault. At 20 years old, Joan (pronounced Jo-Ann) Little was incarcerated in North Carolina when she killed a white jailer who she said tried to rape her. Her trial drew international attention, becoming a rallying point for civil rights, women’s rights and prison reform. The case brought together activists including Angela Davis and Rosa Parks, and catalyzed an international conversation about sexual assault and racial justice that has reverberations to this day. Little’s fight for freedom remains a defining moment in American legal and social history.
A BETTER WAY: JAMES LAWSON, ARCHITECT OF NON-VIOLENCE
124mins
Karen Hayes
Rev. James Lawson helped shape the moral and strategic backbone of the American Civil Rights Movement, yet his story remains largely untold.
A Better Way traces Lawson’s evolution as a minister, teacher, and master strategist of nonviolent resistance, whose guidance helped power pivotal campaigns like the Nashville Sit-ins and the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike—where his close friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Drawing inspiration from Jesus of Nazareth and Mahatma Gandhi, Lawson developed a rigorous architecture of nonviolence that he passed on to leaders including John Lewis, Diane Nash, and Bernard Lafayette. From the South to Los Angeles, where he trained new generations of activists, Lawson’s lifelong work reveals nonviolence as a disciplined, effective force for social transformation—and a blueprint for movements today.
THE EYES OF GHANA
89mins
Ben Proudfoot
From Oscar®-winning director Ben Proudfoot, THE EYES OF GHANA is a stunning feature documentary following 93-year-old documentarian Chris Hesse—personal cinematographer to forgotten African icon Kwame Nkrumah—as he races against blindness and time to rescue and repatriate a secret trove of over 1,000 films that captured the birth of African independence in the fifties and sixties. Yet unseen by the public, these films may not only rewrite Ghanaian and African history—but world history itself.
Kim Watson
Director
Trespass
Kim Watson is an award-winning author, filmmaker, composer, and visual artist whose work explores social justice, identity, and the untold stories found in American cities. He has written for major studios, directed over 30 music videos for Grammy-winning artists, and presented his work at institutions including the University of Southern California and UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Black Studies Research, while also
teaching screenwriting at UCLA Extension.
His immersion into the world of Los Angeles’ Unhoused community began in 2019 with a camera, time, and a willingness to listen… Mutual trust and caring grew into significant relationships and unprecedented access to the lives of the Unhoused across the city. From this lived engagement came TRESPASS: Portraits of Unhoused Life, Love, and Understanding, an award-winning book that laid the foundation for a larger, evolving body of work. TRESPASS expanded into a multimedia exhibition at Los Angeles’ Bestor Architecture Gallery, followed by solo shows in New York, Oakland and DTLA, California, and ultimately into the 2025 feature-length documentary TRESPASS.
The documentary has screened internationally at festivals including the Teaneck International Film Festival and the Seoul International Film Festival and received the Founders Award for Best Documentary Feature
at the 2026 Pan African Film Festival. Supported by honors such as The BookFest First Place Award for
Nonfiction in Society & Social Sciences – Human Rights & Political Movements, the Writers of Note Award and the Directors Grant from The de Groot Foundation, Watson continues to develop TRESPASS as an
immersive, cross-disciplinary project designed to deepen public understanding of homelessness and spark urgent conversation. Through film, photography, and writing, he affirms his lifelong commitment to
creating and using art as a catalyst for change, insisting that art not only reflect injustice but also helps move communities toward empathy, accountability, and action. He is now extending that commitment through
his new project, Searching for Zora – The Face of America Today.
Yoruba Richen
Producer/Director
Free Joan Little
Director and Producer Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who won a Trailblazer Award from Black Public Media. Her most recent film, “American Coup: Wilmington 1898,” was nominated for a Peabody Award. Her film “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” won a Peabody Award, a Gracie Award, and was honored by the Television Academy. Other recent works include the Emmy-nominated films “American Reckoning” and “How It Feels to Be Free.” Her film “The Killing of Breonna Taylor” won an NAACP Image Award. Yoruba is the founding director of the Documentary program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Karen Hayes
Producer/Director
A Better Way: James Lawson, Architect of Non-Violence
Producer/Director Karen Hayes holds an M.F.A. in Film and Television Production from UCLA. She was selected for Black Public Media, the Tribeca All Access and American Film Institute’s (AFI) Directing Workshop for Women (DWW) fellowships.
She wrote, produced, and directed the short film An Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl. Based on the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs it is the story of a Black woman forced to choose between freedom of body and spirit. It screened at the Pan-African Film and other festivals nationally.
Hayes' production company, Ubuntu Motion Pictures, is devoted to telling stories that educate, create dialog about, and promote justice and healing. She has produced many documentary shorts for educational and non-profit organizations, including PSAs on HIV/AIDS Education featuring Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu. Hayes was also granted unique access to follow and film Desmond Tutu internationally over a 15-year period and is completing the resulting documentary feature, The Foolishness of God: A Forgiveness Journey with Desmond Tutu.
Ben Proudfoot
Director/Producer
The Eyes of Ghana
A two-time Academy Award®-winning documentary director and entrepreneur, Ben Proudfoot is the creative force behind Breakwater Studios. Proudfoot’s films have played at festivals including Tribeca, Sundance and Telluride. A watershed partnership with The New York Times produced some sixteen collaborations with over 10 million views including A Concerto is a Conversation, which was nominated for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 93rd Academy Awards®, and The Queen of Basketball, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 94th Academy Awards®. On March 10, 2024, Proudfoot won a second Academy Award®, this time for The Last Repair Shop. Proudfoot views real-world impact as a film’s highest achievement, advocating for The Queen of Basketball’s Lusia Harris’ legacy as a unsung basketball pioneer, and inspiring a $15M capital campaign for the repair facility in The Last Repair Shop. Today, Breakwater Studios has expanded to multiple studio facilities in Los Feliz, where Proudfoot proudly leads twenty-three full-time filmmaking staff producing original documentaries with trusted partners like Google, LinkedIn, UNICEF, L’Oréal Paris, and Charles Schwab. Proudfoot was named one of Forbes "30 Under 30" for his leadership and innovation. He hails from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Proudfoot is an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician and has performed at The Magic Castle in Los Angeles.