The Lilies of the Field

A literary and cinematic classic, The Lilies of the Field tells the story of an itinerant African American worker in the early 1960s who encounters a small group of East German nuns in a parched valley of the American Southwest. An Army vet and a Baptist, Homer Smith offers to help the struggling Roman Catholic nuns build a fence. The only problem? They can’t afford to pay him. But the Mother Superior has something much bigger in mind. She believes Homer was sent to them by God to build a chapel.

In 1963, Sidney Poitier was the first-ever black man to receive the Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Homer Smith in the highly acclaimed film. In 2020, that film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”