REVIEWS

Rotten Tomatoes says it's 100% Fresh! Reviews to read here include the New York Times, Boston Globe, Village Voice, San Francisco Chronicle, and more.

More from The Village Voice

GIFs of press clippings, including the New York Times, New Yorker, and Christian Science Monitor, and The Philadelphia Sun

"A devastating yet inspiring reminder of when racial terror raged through this country and when blacks and whites worked together to stop it. This film can help strengthen this same struggle in our own era."
Morris Dees, Southern Poverty Law Center

"Straightforward yet nuanced, Strange Fruit tells a story that must be told. We know the importance of Billie Holiday's recording. But this indispensable video fills in the history binding the struggle against lynching and for black rights with a wealth of common history of African Americans, Jewish Americans, and the American Left. We need to learn this chapter in our past."
Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University

"Part of our history, part of our heritage. Strange Fruit captures with vivid imagery the history of a song that created immediate controversy as a grim reminder of a necessarily painful and ugly chapter in American history. The song retains its force, because the issues it raises about the legacy of racial terrorism in American society still resonate. Except for Strange Fruit, none of the victims were ever memorialized, their stories & legacies are all but forgotten. This is a fascinating story about a song that compelled its audiences to confont the past in ways that could be genuinely disturbing. It is no less disturbing today."
Leon F. Litwack,
A.F. & May T. Morrison Professor of History,
University of California, Berkeley

"This film is an invaluable illumination of how a singer and a song helped to permanently awaken Americans to a horrifying part of our past that still affects the present. I knew Billie Holiday and how deeply Strange Fruit affected her— as this film vividly shows."
Nat Hentoff, Village Voice

"An excellent documentary ... A thoughtful discussion prompter."
Booklist

"For all audiences, this reflection on a unique song brilliantly captures the relationship between social art and our real lives and history."
Library Journal