The Caucus Hollywood, Entertainment and Culture Bureau
Hip Hop Caucus is bringing new stories to screens everywhere, inspired by the people, communities, and events on the frontlines of the crises we face as humanity.
At Hip Hop Caucus, we listen and engage with communities to understand their stories, and make creative and strategic decisions about the powerful stories that we can elevate and tell in all kinds of formats, whether it is platforming someone who has lived the story to tell it themselves, or bringing in the story into creative original content, events and organizing.
Hip Hop Caucus is bringing new stories to screens and media everywhere, inspired by the people, communities, and events on the frontlines of the crises we face as humanity. We are on the brink of multiple crises that threaten everything from everyday normalcy to our very survival.
Solving the Crisis of Imagination
Audiences are missing stories that imagine where we go from here. To change anything, first we must imagine it differently.
Hip Hop Caucus is bringing new stories to screens everywhere that take us from a crisis of imagination to imagining our way out of crisis.
Based on Nathaniel Rich’s revelatory book Losing Earth, A STATEMENT is a dramatic, darkly comic, true story that asks if it’s possible for any group of people to sit together and tackle the problems of our time when we can’t agree on how to arrange the chairs. The film takes place at a beachside resort in Florida in 1980, where twenty experts gather for a weekend conference on a global issue that is starting to gain traction: the effects of Co2 emissions on the climate. This group of scientists, activists, and policymakers have one simple mandate from Congress — write a statement about what to do. Easier said than done.
Directed by Tom McCarthy
Produced by Mary Aloe
Executive Produced by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, James Parrott, Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., Melinda, Quentin Robert Kessel Andrew lauren, and Alex lebovici
#WhileBlack is an urgent documentary that centers on one of the most viral videos of our time: George Floyd’s murder, seen 1.4 billion times in 12 days, sparking protests in over 2,000 cities worldwide. With exclusive access to Darnella Frazier and others like Diamond Reynolds, who livestreamed Philando Castile’s killing, the film reveals how social platforms and corporations profit from viral Black trauma, while survivors endure lasting psychological and physical danger. #WhileBlack is a powerful meditation on modern witnessing, exposing the human cost of viral footage while asking urgent questions about race, technology, and accountability.
Plastic isn’t just a pollution issue – it’s personal. Microplastics and toxic chemicals are in our brains, our blood, our food, and our unborn children – with health risks linked to rising rates of chronic illnesses like cancer. For millions of hopeful couples, this chemical exposure is harming our fertility and stealing our right to a family. Our bodies are no place for plastic. In The Plastic Detox, six couples with unexplained infertility reduce their plastic exposure to improve their chances of conceiving.
A weekend heat wave. A town facing a water crisis. Sprinkler contractor Lance’s life reaches a tipping point when his estranged son returns home, his daughter is accused of an act of violence, and he is offered a lucrative, but ethically corrupt, job growing alfalfa on parched desert land. Alfalfa dramatizes a contemporary family’s struggle with environmental collapse and challenges audiences to rethink how humans live in balance with the natural world.
Directed by Jack Fessenden
Produced by Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., Lu Robinson, Nevin Kelly-Fair, and Josh Palmer
When the city of Atlanta announces plans to build the largest police training center in the U.S.—destroying a vital urban forest in the process—a decentralized activist movement mobilizes to stop “Cop City.” Forest defenders occupy the Weelaunee forest, disrupting construction through direct action. Their resistance delays the progress of police militarization, but the celebration is cut short when police raid the camp and kill one of the activists, Tortuguita.
Grief turns to defiance as protests spill into the streets, transforming a local land struggle into a national reckoning over policing, environmental justice, and democracy. With rare access, A CITY IN THE FOREST witnesses the power of collective organizing in an urgent and historic struggle.
Narrated by Emmy Award Winner, Wanda Sykes, “Underwater Projects” honors and sheds light on how the climate crisis affects communities of color and offers solutions that achieve environmental justice now. But more importantly, this powerful story illustrates how your vote matters every year – regardless who is in office. Join Hip Hop Caucus to discover and discuss what is at stake for our communities, inspiring ways people are responding, and how we can take action together.
Executive Produced by Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.
Directed by Elizabeth Havstad
Narrated by Emmy Award Winner Wanda Sykes
Newark Black Film Festival Short Film Award
Baltimore International Black Film Festival Audience Award for Best Doc Short
Featured in 13 Film Festivals and 75 Community Screenings
Everyday, the oil, gas and petrochemical industry writes off Black, brown and Indigenous communities as ‘sacrifice zones’. The industry violates laws with impunity and rationalizes the unconscionable – they dump cancer-causing pollution into communities of color and try to cover it up.
Big Oil’s Last Lifeline takes us to the frontlines of the U.S.’s epicenters for petrochemical production: West Virginia, Houston, and along the Mississippi River in Louisiana.
Executive Produced by Hip Hop Caucus and Majestic 9 Productions
The promise held by greening America’s cities presents the opportunity to fight the climate crisis while also revitalizing communities of color struggling from decades of economic and environmental despair. “Green the Block: Unpaving the Concrete Jungle” takes place in Los Angeles, one of America’s most polluted cities. It engages on environmental justice issues and solutions for communities of color to own their land, take care of it, and leave it in a better place for future generations.
Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave is a stand-up comedy special from the frontlines of the climate crisis. It’s filmed in the St. Paul’s district of Norfolk, VA, a Black public housing community that is being redeveloped because of climate flooding, sea level rise, and a legacy of racist urban policies. The city of Norfolk, which is below sea level and sinking, is grappling with the climate crisis and racial injustice.
Four Black millennial stand-up comedians take the stage to “make the climate crisis funny” in front of a St. Paul’s audience who are at risk for a Hurricane Katrina-like disaster and who are currently being displaced from their homes. Things are not so funny when it’s clear that climate threats can mean life or death. But, in the Black American tradition of struggle, resilience, and triumph in the face of existential threat, the joy of comedy, music, and art informs and empowers.
Weathering the Storm 20 Years after Hurricane Katrina
For many of us, we’ve continued to weather the storm for 20 years. “Weathering the Storm” is a powerful limited series marking the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina as both a history lesson and as a living, ongoing story. Through the voices of survivors, artists, and frontline leaders, this series traces how a city drowned by government failure, systemic racism, and environmental neglect sparked a rebirth of Black culture, resistance, and joy. It is a story of grief—and of power.
From hustlin’ to the polls ASAP with T.I., to waking up with the Breakfast Club and Charlamagne tha God, to showing ‘em why “We Different” with 2 Chainz, Respect My Vote has been woven into the fabric of Hip Hop for 18 years. But the beat doesn’t stop here. To keep this momentum going at full volume, we need supporters like you.
