This profile is part of our Culture Shifters series, which highlights people who are changing the way we think about the world around us. Read about internet stars Keyon Elkins and Drew Afualo , rapper Latash , music historian Katelina Eccleston , filmmaker Alika Tengan , and actors Rhoyle Ivy King and Nicco Annan .

Like anyone else whos had a lifelong love affair with movies, Maya Cade struggles to name which films from her vast personal collection she would grab if she could only fit three in a bag on an extended trip out of town.

Oh, shoot, she began during a video call in a cozy, one-hour reserved room on a jam-packed work day. Carmen Jones . Well, actually, Im going to take it back. Let me think.

After some internal debate she would definitely bring more films in the event of, say, a fire Cade gleefully selected The Wiz starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, the Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones romance Claudine , and filmmaker Kathleen Collins groundbreaking 1982 drama, Losing Ground. Theyre apt choices for someone who has spent a significant amount of time researching and curating the Black Film Archive , a website that features similarly underappreciated and less accessible gems.

It only takes a few clicks at this online treasure trove of vintage Black cinema before youre jettisoned back to, for instance, 1972 when actor Cicely Tyson persevered as a mother and sharecropper in 1930s Louisiana after her husband (played by Paul Winfield) is imprisoned in Sounder . Or perhaps youll go further back to 1944, when the stories of Black mens contributions to the American war effort were told in the documentary short The Negro Soldier .

Spanning across genres and eras up to 1979, the Black Film Archive is a balm for many frustrations about Black people in movies that you might have heard about on the internet like the endless Black trauma discourse or the lack of diverse Black experiences onscreen. For Cade, 28, the archive is a way for her to enter these conversations not from a scarcity mindset, but from one that points to the actual abundance of cinematic options shes painstakingly surfaced, with context and links to where they can be streamed right now.

Like many cultural trends and events these days, the nascent stage of the archive began on Twitter in June 2020.

I started the process of collecting these films in a thread, Cade recalled, when we were seeing Black Lives Matter marches and conversations about Black films are only this. Theyre only that. I just knew that there was a whole other world that people werent seeing.