An inspired prism through which to assort a wildly diverse and unusual batch of films, the Afro-Punk Festival — now in its third year at BAMcinématek at the Brooklyn Academy of Music — seizes the screen with a radical sensibility and a genre-detonating zeal. Inspired by filmmaker (and co-curator) James Spooner’s 2003 documentary “Afro-Punk,” which explored the black embrace of punk-rock style and ideals, the week-long series veers from Blaxploitation outrage to avant-garde gestures, with a heap of classic music documentaries, harrowing social studies, and forgotten oddities.

There is a surplus of serious fare in the program, including documentaries devoted to the Black Panther movement and an appreciation of filmmaker William Greaves and his experimental documentary from 1968, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.” But Mr. Spooner, who will make appearances at screenings (as will other directors), takes the term “punk” even more seriously, mashing up high and low cinema to thought-provoking effect.

Who’s up for a new 35 mm print of 1972’s “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes”? Exploitation great J. Lee Thompson’s addition to the simian canon was the fourth film in the “Apes” cycle. It becomes a wigged-out freedom saga as Roddy McDowall, playing the defiant Caesar, rallies a nation of enslaved apes to throw off their chains of oppression and stick it to the man. How fitting that it screens this weekend along with “The Man,” also from 1972, in which James Earl Jones — and, indeed, who else? — plays the first black American president. The political drama, directed by Joseph Sargent (“Colussus: The Forbin Project”) from Rod Serling’s adaptation of Irving Wallace’s potboiler, offers a flashback to a time when such a notion seemed an incredible stretch.

Completing a kind of drive-in mini-fest are rare screenings of “The Final Comedown” (1972), with Billy Dee Williams as a black-power street warrior, and Samuel Fuller’s once-controversial “White Dog” (1982), which was butchered on initial release and rather meaninglessly drew the curtain on the great director’s career. The lurid premise is pure Fuller: A young woman (Kristy McNichol) discovers that the German Shepherd she’s taken in becomes a vicious attack dog in the presence of black people. She takes it to Paul Winfield for “deprogramming,” with wholly unpredictable — and richly ironic — results. Misunderstood at the time, “White Dog” has enjoyed a cultish following through the years, not least for its Ennio Morricone score and its flashes of Fuller-esque tabloid commentary.

The festival juxtaposes such over-the-top fare with earnest indie efforts, such as David Gordon Green’s magical “George Washington,” a genuine and touching study of white and black children growing up poor in a small North Carolina town. The film’s naturalistic style is long on its first-time actors’ improvisations and Mr. Green’s restlessly lyrical camera, which imbues the screen with a profoundly felt sense of place. The story’s dark undertow never submerges its tender spirit, its lingering, candid observations, or its gentle humor: It’s a movie people fall in love with.

The same can be said for the festival’s mother lode of music documentaries, which include D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s “Monterey Pop” outtakes, “Jimi Plays Monterey” and “Shake: Otis at Monterey,” both of which capture Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding at their galvanizing, iconographic primes, and the delirious “Space Is the Place “(1974), which combines concert footage of Sun Ra and his Arkestra with a plot involving the extraterrestrial bandleader as a superhero battling for the future of the black race.

Most memorable, though, is the late Thomas Reichman’s hour-long “Mingus,” which finds the protean jazz bassist in a cantankerous mood as he is about to be evicted from his East Village loft. These days, it would be the kind of uncensored, offstage ranting that might surface on YouTube, but here it plays like an open wound. And just wait until Mingus grabs his shotgun. He’ll show you what “punk” is all about.

Through July 7 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).