An Important African-American Filmmaker - RIP

His death has sadly been confirmed, after a few days fighting for survival on life-support.

As many of you will be aware, he was not only the youngest filmmaker to be nominated for a Best Director Academy Award for Boyz n the Hood in 1991, he was also, shockingly, the first African-American filmmaker to receive this honour.

After a few interesting and personal, but ultimately flawed and middling follow-ups to the seminal Boys n the Hood, including Poetic Justice and Higher Learning, Singleton unfortunately got sucked into generic moviemaking with the more commercially successful but less interesting likes of Shaft and 2 Fast 2 Furious, and one is inclined to wonder whether Singleton might one day have returned to the powerful and thoughtful types of films he first made his name with.

Nevertheless, even if he'll only truly be known for one film, which as a young black man raised in a community where so many of his peers were dead by their mid-twenties, he no doubt believed might have been his one and only shot to fully express himself and his preoccupations, that film, Boys n the Hood and its impact will continue to have a long legacy.