Born in Oklahoma, raised in Portland, based at various times in Los Angeles, Paris, Houston, and Buffalo, and gone much too soon, James Blue (1930-1980) was a filmmaking dynamo who left behind an engaged and impassioned body of work that’s begging for rediscovery. His best-known film, which made him the first American to win the Critic’s Prize at Cannes, was his 1962 The Olive Trees of Justice—enjoying a concurrent re-release run at Metrograph. But that film, an adaptation of a novel by Jean Pélégri set against the backdrop of the Algerian struggle for independence, represents only a fraction of Blue’s total output. As his only fiction feature, The Olive Trees of Justice is an outlier in Blue’s filmography, but the careful counterbalance of the personal and political found in it runs through his nonfiction cinema, the subject of this retrospective. Included are films made for the United States Information Agency (USIA), stinging social portraits of Houston’s neglected neighborhoods, and intelligent, empathetic expeditions to both Algeria and Kenya—works that have lost none of their imperative immediacy through the years.