Film Forum

An actor, director, producer and writer whose 40-year career has been characterized by a commitment to raising consciousness, Mario Van Peebles was born in Mexico and grew up traveling with his parents between Europe and the United States. When he first went to Hollywood, he didn’t like the roles available for people of color, so he “went from being a job seeker to a job creator.” Van Peebles is perhaps best known for the 1991 hit New Jack City, a crime drama that followed the rise and fall of a drug lord during the crack epidemic of the late 1980s. Posse (1993), his next directing-acting turn, brought a rarely seen view of the American West to the big screen by focusing on a group of African-American infantrymen returning from the Spanish-American War. Van Peebles also wrote, directed and acted in the 2003 biopic Baadasssss!, based on the true story of his father, director Melvin Van Peebles, whom he portrays as he struggled to make what became his radical breakthrough film in the early 1970s. Van Peebles has also played the civil rights leaders Stokely Carmichael (in Panther) and Malcolm X (in Ali). More recently, he directed the films USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage (2017) and Armed (2018). Among his television directing credits are 21 Jump Street, Empire, Power, and Superstition.

The new 4K restoration of THE STORY OF A THREE DAY PASS by IndieCollect was developed in consultation with Mario Van Peebles and made possible with support from the Hollywood Foreign Press.