Burnett was born on April 13, 1944, in
Vicksburg, Mississippi, to a nurse's aide and a military father. According to a DNA analysis, he is mainly descended from people from
Sierra Leone. In 1947, Charles's family moved to
Watts, a largely black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. Burnett first enrolled at
Los Angeles City College to study electronics in preparation for a career as an electrician. In an interview for
Cahiers du Cinéma, Burnett speculated that "a serious speech impediment" may have led him to become a filmmaker: I always felt like an outsidean observerwho wasn't able to participate because I couldn't speak very well. So this inability to communicate must have led me...to find some other means to express myself...I really liked a lot of the kids I grew up with. I felt an obligation to write something about them, to explain what went wrong with them. I think that's the reason I started to make these movies. Burnett continued his education at the UCLA film school, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in theater arts and film. His professors Elyseo Taylor, who created the department of Ethno-Communications, and
Basil Wright, a British documentarian, also had a significant influence on his work. The films of this group of African and African American filmmakers had strong relevance to the politics and culture of the 1960s, yet stayed true to the history of their people. Another accomplishment of the Black Independent Movement and Burnett was the creation of the Third World Film Club. The club joined with other organizations in a successful campaign to break the American boycott banning all forms of cultural exchange with
Cuba. Many critics have compared the films of the Black Independent Movement to Italian neorealist films of the 1940s, Third World Cinema films of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the 1990s Iranian New Wave. At the time the movement flourished, many countries in the Third World were involved in a struggle for revolution, inspiring them to create films expressing their own indigenous views of their history and culture. In addition to staying true to history, many Black Independent Movement films have been considered a response to Hollywood and
Blaxploitation films that were popular at the time. == Career==