MOCA Artist Film Series: Billy Woodberry
MOCA Grand Ave 
Saturday, July 26th, 2025
3 pm
Free with RSVP

Legendary Beat figure Bob Kaufman considered poetry a key to human survival, an idea made all the more legitimate by the longevity it's granted: the things he saw, heard, tasted, felt, and, most of all, thought were preserved in his work. Embodying the spirit of those efforts, the new film from Billy Woodberry, director of the landmark Bless Their Little Hearts, is perhaps the closest we can come to knowing the man and his time.

The picture is alternately dense and fleet in its assemblage of archival footage and photos, interviews with contemporaries, and readings from the likes of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. And When I Die's cumulative effect is to understand a familiar, over-exposed era with new eyes, thanks in no small part to the honest assessment provided by some of New York's Beat generation some half-century removed.

Its soundtrack (with selections by the likes of Billie Holiday and Ornette Coleman) hums, the participants are lively in their recollection of the man and his words, and the pace of its montage is energetic — a whirlwind procession that will leave viewers with a vivid understanding of Kaufman and his work.

Billy Woodberry is one of the leading figures of the LA Rebellion—the new wave of Black American independent cinema that emerged from UCLA’s film school in the ‘70s and ’80s. Woodberry created one of the movement’s defining works with his neorealist masterpiece Bless Their Little Hearts, an aching portrait of an ordinary family buckling under marital and economic pressures. Since then, Woodberry has forged his own distinctive brand of archival documentary filmmaking in searching, politically trenchant works like And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead and his latest, Mário, a portrait of the Pan-African thinker and activist Mário Pinto de Andrade, founder of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).