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NPR’s Tiny Desk series is dedicating the month of June to “giving the ladies their flowers” during Black Music Month. On Tuesday, Tiny Desk hosted music legend Chaka Khan for a full 35-minute performance of her biggest hits.

The 10-time Grammy winner set the energy high with “Tell Me Something Good” before hitting high notes on “What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me” and “Stay” in between sips of tea. “It is tiny but it’s nice to be so close together with all of you, I can see not...

As the year-end holidays start to become everyone’s main focus here’s a documentary feature that zeros in on the desired destination of travelers…home. But what if it’s denied you? Is it worth fighting for, even risking imprisonment? That’s the focus of this film, the value of the home, and most importantly the land. Sounds a bit similar to the epic docudrama arriving today from Martin Scorsese, eh? Now, that’s set one hundred years ago with murder stemming from a lust for oil-rich land. This doc concerns the lust for water, rather than oil. It’s a valued beachfront property. Plus it all happened in the last dozen or so years. Despite all the nefarious plans of developers, could anyone possibly displace the families on Silver Dollar Road?

Oh, and unlike the other big film this weekend, we’re not talking about a tribe, but another minority.

The land troubles for the Reels family, which are chronicled in Raoul Peck’s new documentary “Silver Dollar Road,” all started when Elijah Reels passed away without a will. This left everyone in the family as a stakeholder in the property. “Because everybody is a stakeholder of the property, whether you live on it or move to New Jersey or Texas, you somehow have a piece of the property and one particular brother pretended that he owned that little 13 acres on the water,” Peck tells Gold Derby during our recent web chat (watch the exclusive video interview above). This has allowed the property to be sold to Adam’s Creek Associates, despite the Reels family having lived on that property for more than a century. “The justice itself has not played a good role in that story because they allowed the exploitations of loopholes and that the family was not properly informed of the situation.

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Amazon releases the film in select theaters on Friday, October 13, and it will be available to stream on Prime Video on Saturday, October 21.

Captured in soaring overhead shots, Silver Dollar Road is hazy, lush, and calm, with tall pine trees towering over grassy fields on the way to the shoreline. Down on the ground, things are less tranquil. The road, which gives its name to Raoul Peck’s latest documentary, leads down to a sprawling beachfront property in North Carolina that’s been the site of a raging legal battle between the Reels, a Black family that owned the land for over a century, and the real estate developers trying to take it from them. Eventually, two Reels family members, Melvin Davis and Licurtus Reels, serve an eight-year prison sentence for failing to vacate their own homes.

In 2021, Raoul Peck released Exterminate All the Brutes, an extraordinary HBO docuseries chronicling the history of white supremacy, its mythology and the rise of fascism around the world. It was a powerful project that, like his Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, presented a cogent thesis about the rot of racism. In these works, the director foregrounded an essayistic narrative, using words to guide viewers through the brutality of Western civilization.

Peck takes a more conventional route in his latest documentary, but the results are no less stirring. In Silver Dollar Road, the Haitian filmmaker constructs an intimate drama about one family’s decades-long struggle to protect their land from developer encroachment. The Reels’ story will be familiar to anyone attuned to the contradictions embedded in America’s legal system and the failed promises of Reconstruction.

When Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reel refused to leave the waterfront portion of...