Pam Grier Double Bill: Foxy Brown
Part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour: a Watershed project in association with Wiper & True and collaboration with principal sponsors Park Circus and StudioCanal. With support from BFI Audience Projects Fund awarding National Lottery funding.
The films in this season, far from the liberal consensus often associated with Hollywood of the period, are darkly difficult in terms of subject matter and provocative in their politically contradictory nature.
Bleak, unsettling but endlessly rewarding, these films are testament to a period when some in the Hollywood mainstream went very rogue. They provide a fascinating snapshot of America which resonates today.
Curated by CULTPLEX, Ellen Smith (freelance film programmer and Projectionist at HOME) and Andy Willis (Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford and Senior Visiting Curator at HOME).
She's brown sugar and spice, but if you don't treat her nice, she'll put you on ice! Join us for our special Pam Grier Double Bill!
After her undercover police officer boyfriend is murdered by a powerful crime syndicate, Foxy Brown sets out on a dangerous mission to expose the organization responsible. As she infiltrates a world of corruption, crime, and exploitation, Foxy risks everything in pursuit of justice, discovering that survival demands more than strength. It demands strategy.
In a genre overflowing with men settling scores through bullets, brute force, and domination, Pam Grier rewrote the rules of revenge. Foxy does not simply fight her enemies. She outsmarts them. She navigates a world built to exploit Black women by turning its own systems of power against themselves. Her intelligence becomes her greatest weapon. Her femininity becomes strategy. Her community becomes the reason she refuses to stop.
Nearly fifty years later, Foxy Brown remains one of the defining works of Blaxploitation cinema, not because it is flawless, but because it asks us to wrestle with its contradictions. It presents one of the era’s most unforgettable Black heroines while existing within an exploitation genre that often commodified Black bodies and sensationalized violence. The result is a film that is as provocative as it is empowering, inviting audiences to consider what liberation looks like when every available path has already been weaponized against you.
Pam Grier’s performance is magnetic, fearless, and endlessly influential. Decades before Hollywood regularly imagined Black women as action heroes, she embodied strength without sacrificing vulnerability, confidence without apology, and rage without losing sight of compassion.
All of our screenings are 18+ unless otherwise stated, and the film start time is as advertised above.
Content Warnings: depictions and themes of sexual violence, gender based violence, physical violence, drug trafficking, racism.
Check out the HOME programme for Rogue Hollywood
here.
- Runtime: 94 minutes
- Director: Jack Hill
- Country: USA
- Year: 1974
