Marlon Riggs died while making Black Is…Black Ain’t, which includes scenes of the filmmaker describing his AIDS symptoms from a hospital bed. It’s a poignant if seemingly odd starting point for a video essay explicitly concerned with African-American identity (ultimately finished by his collaborator Christiane Badgley in 1995). But as a gay rights activist and poet, Riggs was already exiled from at least one the stereotypes that has come, rightly or wrongly, to define the black experience (a clip from Eddie Murphy: Raw is used to illustrate the kind of swinging dick machismo we’re talking about here.)

In total, Riggs examines in fluid, almost conversational style, the vast diversity within America’s black community. Cornel West and Angela Davis are among those interviewed, given the job of obliterating the kind of clichés that have been exported to the rest of the world; something vividly felt when Davis, the image of a fugitive Black Panther still in the background, talks about her European education.

Riggs’s gumbo metaphor might be a bit obvious, but then a certain mixed-race group in Louisiana shows up to explain that they’re neither black nor white; they’re Creole. By the end of Black Is… Black Ain’t, an almost entirely non-black audience in Vancouver will have been disabused of its narrow perceptions of African-American life. It’s an important gift, bequeathed by a beautiful soul.