Charles Burnett was one of the "LA School" of African American filmmakers that emerged from the UCLA film school in the 1970s. Killer of Sheep, made on a shoestring budget, was his thesis film. The film's subject matter was in itself revolutionary: the daily lives of blue-collar black Americans in the Watts area of Los Angeles were not the usual stuff of Hollywood movies. Killer of Sheep is an unsentimental film of astonishing poignancy that manages to be simultaneously naturalistic and poetic, witty and heartbreaking. The story centers around Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) whose brutal labor in a slaughterhouse barely keeps his family out of poverty. It documents his struggle to retain dignity and integrity in the face of grinding deprivation and disquieting temptations, and the alienation that threatens to break him away from his family. It also provides a clear-eyed portrait of a community assaulted by penury and lack of opportunity, yet miraculously finding moments of beauty and hope. Killer of Sheep was awarded top prizes at the Berlin and Sundance Film Festivals and in 1990 was named to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. Burnett has garnered such prestigious honors as a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Paul Robeson Award.-Sally HubbardPreservation funded by the Ahmanson Foundation in association with the Sundance Institute.