Until the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s, black and white audiences in America had to use separate movie theatres. In 1916 a new industry had begun with the first "all coloured" film, made as a protest against D W Griffith's Birth of a Nation. Director Russ Karel 's documentary charts the development of the independent African-American cinema movement through the eyes of the segregated audiences and tells of the fate of those opposing that dehumanising social order, including Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker , during the McCarthy era.