Known for Writing
Kevin Willmott (born August 31, 1959) is an Academy Award-winning American film director and screenwriter. He is known for work focusing on black issues, including writing and directing Ninth Street, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, and Bunker Hill. His The Only Good Indian (2009) was a feature film about Native American children at an Indian boarding school and the forced assimilation that took place. In Jayhawkers (2014), he followed the life of Wilt Chamberlain, Phog Allen and the 1956 Kansas Jayhawks basketball team. Willmott has collaborated with Spike Lee, with whom he shared an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for BlacKkKlansman. The two again collaborated in writing Da 5 Bloods, released worldwide digitally on June 12, 2020. Wilmott is a professor of film at the University of Kansas. Description above from the Wikipedia article Kevin Willmott, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Born
August 31, 1959 (age 67)
Birthplace
Junction City, Kansas, USA
Filmography
30 films, 1 show


No Place Like Home
2022 · 1h
Directed by Oscar winner Kevin Willmott, No Place Like Home takes you on a tour of a deep red state, to meet people who have found themselves in a battle for LGBTQ rights in the most unlikely places. In places like rural Trego County, Salina and Topeka, you'll meet some of the people C.J. Janovy profiles in her book No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism in LGBT Kansas (University Press of Kansas, January 2018). You'll also meet emerging activists - ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all because they're committed to securing justice for everyone in their home state.


The 24th
2020 · 1h 41m · US
The incredibly powerful and timely true story of the all-black Twenty-Fourth United States Infantry Regiment, and the Houston Riot of 1917. The Houston Riot was a mutiny by 156 African American soldiers in response to the brutal violence and abuse at the hands of Houston police officers.


William Allen White: What's the Matter with Kansas
2018 · 1h
Narrated by Bill Kurtis, this documentary that explores the life an accomplishments of William Allen White.


Jayhawkers
2014 · 1h 46m · US
A group of unlikely allies modernized college sports and changed a small Midwestern town, serving as a parallel to the Civil Rights movement that would transform the entire American society.


Destination: Planet Negro!
2013 · 1h 38m
In 1939, a group of African American intellectuals come up with an ingenious and unlikely response to Jim Crow America -- leave the planet and populate Mars. Using technology created by George Washington Carver, a three-person crew (plus one rambunctious robot) lift-off in Earth's first working spaceship on a mission that will take them to a world not unlike present-day America. Their spacey adventure illuminates some hard truths about American culture, and threatens to undermine the time-line of history along the way.


The Only Good Indian
2009 · 1h 54m
Set in Kansas during the early 1900s, a teen-aged Native American boy is taken from his family and forced to attend a distant Indian "training" school to assimilate into White society. When he escapes to return to his family, Sam Franklin, a bounty hunter of Cherokee descent, is hired to find and return him to the institution. Franklin, a former Indian scout for the U.S. Army, has renounced his Native heritage and has adopted the White Man's way of life, believing it's the only way for Indians to survive. Along the way, a tragic incident spurs Franklin's longtime nemesis, the famous "Indian Fighter" Sheriff Henry McCoy, to pursue both Franklin and the boy.


Bunker Hill
2008 · 1h 50m · US
Peter Salem, a former Wall Street executive recently released from prison, returns to his ex-wife and children in the small town of Bunker Hill, Kansas. Soon after he arrives, the town's electricity and power are shut off, and there is no way to communicate with authorities outside of town. The town's militant past is reawakened and forces coalesce to protect citizens from an unseen enemy. The town's fear leads to the creation of a posse of gunmen, resulting in torture, illegal searches and eventually, murder, against which Salem must stand.


C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
2005 · 1h 29m · US
Through the eyes of a British "documentary", this film takes a satirically humorous, and sometimes frightening, look at the history of an America where the South won the Civil War.
Ninth Street
Ninth Street
1999 · 1h 35m · US
The inhabitants of a deteriorating section of 1968 Junction City, Kansas known as "Junk City" bemoan their existence and revel at the history of their neighborhood during its 1940's heydays when legendary jazz musicians regularly played its clubs. In 1968, the area has diminished to strip clubs and juke joints inhabited by Vietnam War draftees that pass through from nearby Fort Riley. Heads of the group include a wino who lost a leg in WWII, a taxi dispatcher, a saloon owner, and a crazed bag lady. The younger generation is represented by a young prostitute who is trying to get off the streets, but is forced to continue to work by a no-good boy friend and the need to feed her baby. Martin Sheen also appears as a white minister who prefers the people in the area over his own congregation.