Jafa’s work can be seen as a kind of missing link in our understanding of just how crucial it has been to civil rights to turn the camera back upon the white gaze in order to make the world see and believe. In 1955, Jet magazine published images of the mutilated face of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi a few days after he whistled at the wife of one of the men, helping to catalyze the civil rights movement. In 1965, when voting-rights marchers in Selma, Ala., were run down by policemen, tens of millions of Americans watched on the evening news. “We no longer will let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners,” Martin Luther King Jr. said soon after. “We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.” #BlackLivesMatter became a hashtag in the summer of 2013, when the community organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi responded to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who killed the black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Since then, it has become the banner under which disparate organizations and millions of individuals press for change, but even Jafa didn’t anticipate the ways in which citizen documentation by smartphone would become an instinct, a reaction to a social pressure that has been building against centuries of white denial. “I remember distinctly telling somebody, ‘That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. A camera in a phone?’ But here we are. Once someone documented [this brutality], it became a modus operandi. At a certain point, it wasn’t just that they knew they could do it — they felt compelled to do it.”

If Jafa’s late-career success also feels like a triumph for other artists striving to make films that exist outside Hollywood structures and conventions — more experimental filmmakers like Joseph, Ja’Tovia Gary and Terence Nance — it nearly didn’t happen. He recalls a conversation with Bradford Young, the cinematographer of 2014’s “Selma” and one of several friends who tried to intervene when the bottom fell out for Jafa in 2011. “I’m sitting in his car, and I’m really depressed, real suicidal,” Jafa says, “and Brad turned to me and he said, ‘Why do you think you’re not enough?’ And I was like, ‘Because I’m a big failure.’ He said, ‘Well for us, you are enough, because we all feel like you kinda ...’ And then he didn’t say anything for a long time.” Young broke the silence by saying that for young black filmmakers, “You’re like our Frodo,” the central character of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” who goes on an arduous journey to destroy the One Ring, an object of mysterious power. Jafa’s love of science fiction didn’t extend to fantasy (“I don’t like unicorns or fairies or stuff like that”), so Young explained the story for him: “And he said, ‘You have Aragorn, he’s a classic king with a sword and born into it. And you’ve got the elves, and they have the archery and telepathy skills. And you’ve got the dwarfs who can forge iron weapons. And then you have Frodo. Frodo was little. He wasn’t strong. He wasn’t the smartest. He wasn’t the bravest.’ ”

“But,” Young told Jafa, “he could bear the weight of the Ring.”