I recalled being mesmerized by Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing when first seeing it in theaters; it was the first major film I'd seen that captured the urban African American community respectfully without resorting to cliché. His 1989 film felt like the real deal.

I've since learned that Lee wasn't the first. Twenty-two years earlier, Mississippi born UCLA film student Charles Burnett debuted a magnificent study of Watts with his thesis project, Killer of Sheep. Rarely viewed in the U.S. (due to lack of music rights to the 22 soundtrack songs), Burnett's film primarily had screened in European film festivals. The "lost classic" had won critical praise from the few privileged to see it, and it was among the first fifty films placed by National Film Registry in the Library of Congress due to its cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance.

Thirty years after creation, archivists have lovingly preserved and restored Burnett's film for posterity. The music rights have been obtained (except for Dinah Washington's "Unforgettable" over the final sequence), the B&W negative upgraded from 16mm to 35mm, and released into selected arthouses in 2007 and on DVD by Milestone Film. It's a good time for cineastes, at last rewarded with Burnett's bluesy neo-realistic portrait of LA's South Central community—a direct anti-thesis to mainstream black stereotypes and the blaxploitation films popular in the mid 1970s.

Burnett doesn't discard unemployment and poverty in Watts, but he doesn't exploit it. The film paints vividly the life of the underclass, but they don't decry their situation. It's more a sensitive and humanistic demonstration of getting by day to day. The idea of poverty doesn't dominate the thinking of the characters.

Composed of various vignettes but primarily focusing on one family, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) cleans the floors and herds the sheep at a slaughterhouse—mind numbing work, but it pays the bills. He's raising a young son and daughter with his wife (Kaycee Moore) in a small apartment complex. The children do what kids do—run and play war games in dusty empty lots, jump across apartment rooftops, see how long they can stand on their heads, whimsically put on Halloween masks, occasionally hurt each other and get chastised by their parents.

Unlike most of his friends, Stan's has a regular job. This sets up a scene where a white store owner blatantly propositions him, but Stan adroitly backs off appropriately. He forms the moral center of the film, and he is anything but an oversexed "Super Fly" styled black man. Among the most poignant and beautifully composed sequences shows Stan dancing to Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth" with his wife, rejecting her sexual advances and illuminating her painful frustration.

Don't expect smooth flowing throughout. Like the blues, soul searching sequences are frequently juxtaposed with truly humorous moments—Stan and a friend labor to load an engine block into a pickup truck only to soon see it tumble onto the pavement, a neighbor reaches through the missing windshield of a car to grab a beer, looters botch the theft of a television in Three Stooges style.

Real blues aficionados love live performances despite the inherent imperfections. They are real experiences that allow the artist and audience to interact, and Burnett's film achieves much of the same. The acting and dialogue often come across awkwardly, but the underlying feelings communicated are undeniably real—the hallmark of great independent cinema. It's a simple film that freezes 1977 Watts forever, unfettered by Hollywood influence.

Film school projects often pretentiously mimic influential directors and attempt to dazzle stylistically and clobber with message without taking the time for character and content. Not so with Burnett's film thesis. Just as blues and jazz are cited as America's greatest contribution to world music, Burnett's film rifts across similar terrain. Although largely scripted, Killer of Sheep fills the screen with visual poetry that plays like intimate documentary—an unforgettable historic and cultural landmark from 1997 that ranks among the best films released in 2007.