film

Today it is almost impossible to see what the world was like as an African American teenage boy living in the American South during the Jim Crow era.

It’s been a banner year (pun intended) in the Boston arts scene. Heading into 2025, we’re looking back at some of our most notable arts stories from 2024. In both local and national categories, diverse stories shone.

In the United Kingdom from September 1940 to May 1941, cities like London were under attack in an eight-month-long aerial bombardment from Nazi Germany known as the Blitz. British director Sir Steve McQueen (“12 Years a Slave”) uses the months long attacks for the backdrop of his newest film “Blitz.

For years, art museums and their critics have discussed repatriation. In the art world, repatriation is the act of returning controversially acquired artifacts to their home countries. “Controversially acquired” is really a euphemism for stolen and looted art typically acquired during times of conflict like war and colonization.

“Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” hit movie theaters in 1991, fueling a popular cultural fantasy of teenagers running their lives without adult supervision. The story got a contemporary makeover in the 2024 remake, directed by Wade Allain-Marcus and centering a Black family.

Meditations on forgiveness, harm and repair in father-son relationships are explored in artist Titus Kaphar’s directorial debut, “Exhibiting Forgiveness.”

Sabrina Avilés founded CineFest Latino in 2022 as a way of giving back to her community, she said. Breaking into the industry as a Latina was challenging for Avilés, so she wanted to take “a lot of these filmmakers under my wings” and give them opportunities that she had fought to get.

The film “Sing Sing,” directed by Greg Kwedar and starring Colman Domingo, explores the true story of a group of men who find solace and connection in Rehabilitation Through the Arts, or RTA, a program providing arts education for incarcerated people.

Through its ParkARTS program, the Boston Parks and Recreation Department enlivens pockets of green space across the city, bringing arts workshops, concerts, movies and puppet shows to city-run parks year-round, with a more concentrated calendar in the summer months, all free of charge.

“Challengers” is a titillating Luca Guadagnino film about desire, love and loss set against the backdrop of professional tennis.

Every year since its founding in 1999, what’s now known as the Roxbury International Film Festival has brought underrepresented stories to silver screens in Boston.

Amid the tensions that brewed following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Ava DuVernay read journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” published that summer. The book, DuVernay admitted, had been sitting on her coffee table for a while before she decided to read it.