Because DVD is non-linear, viewers can have slightly different experiences of the content, depending on where they choose to begin. I cued up "Hip Hop: The New World Order" first, mainly because the DVD jacket said it "features Chuck D of 'Public Enemy'," a good jumping-off point for me. Turns out that old Chuck is on-screen for maybe 20 seconds and doesn't even have much to say. The film is really a low-down documentary by Muhammida El Muhajir, an enthusiastic 20-something who jetted around the world with a video camera and sought out the hip-hop underground in each locale. The result is an entertaining, if necessarily superficial, look at either the shared language of hip-hop beats or the current vogue in cultural imperialism, depending on your degree of cynicism. Japanese kids go nuts at a concert as popsters with names like Zeebra and Rhymster strike poses and rhyme in (usually) English. It took me a second to figure out that one of the kids was explaining that Yokohama has more "low riders" than Tokyo. As the interviews take place, you can often hear Muhammida giggling in the background. Infectious.

Things get more interesting when Muhammida arrives in Cuba, where the situation is apparently reminiscent of that in the South Bronx back in the late 1970s, before hip-hop record labels existed. In Cuba, hip-hop is being created in homes and on the streets. Think of this no-frills field recording as a corollary to the Buena Vista Social Club. "To talk about Cuba, you've got to talk about politics," says producer Pablo Herrera. "It's a hard thing, you know? What people tend to forget is that ... we are a country at war." The director also visits London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Paris, and promises that hip-hop fact-finding trips to Brazil and South Africa are coming soon.

Hip-hop aside, the disc is being promoted mainly on the strength of "true.", the ingenious short film about, um, modes of communication that became the wildly successful series of "WHAZZZZUP?" Budweiser commercials that I was, blissfully, never subjected to. Also featured is the $14,000 "Breakdown," a contrived but visually intriguing yarn about the minutes leading up to a shootout at L.A.'s Union Square terminal. Vanessa Williams stars, Jeff Byrd writes and directs, and cinematographer Keith Smith makes it real easy to watch, matching the dark skin tones of his lead actress with the color scheme of the train station.

"Kings" is a simple but affecting tale of a successful corporate attorney who's approached at work one day by a scruffy boyhood friend, who offers him the opportunity to return to the old neighborhood to fulfill a shared dream from long ago, and "A Gut Feeling" is a Spike Lee-produced cop story with a truly weird undercurrent.

Slightly less successful are the talky, unconvincing "Breakfast at Ben's" (commissioned by the Afrocentricity publisher), although it's still worth a look, and "The Gift," the occasionally artful tale of a blind sculptor and a miracle operation that plays like pure soap opera.

Unlike too many Short installments, which included one or two great pieces and a whole lot of dross to fill out the disc, Afrocentricity feels like it has a point of view and some degree of quality control. Don't get me wrong -- we can't expect too much from short films, which are basically a venue for directors to learn their trade before graduating to making features. And, with the exception of "true.", none of these qualifies as seamless filmmaking. But the jacket claims that this disc includes 160 minutes of content, and I'll be damned if I didn't spend part of last night and another part of today contendedly skating through it all, commentary tracks and director interviews inclusive. Basically, after watching "Hip Hop" and "true.", I was hooked. (The heavy piano-bass-and-drums hip-hop loop that plays underneath each menu is a nice touch.)

Warner Home Video has priced these discs right, at $14.98, and inclusion on a collection like this could wind up being an end in itself, allowing more black filmmakers an opportunity to learn the trade with the promise of a viable avenue for distribution. (Streaming video is still a non-starter for me, considering the lack of video quality offered by even a DSL connection.) The disc contains some profanity and nudity, but still begs to be used in the classroom, where students could probably benefit from discussion of some of the issues raised. One thing that has to be fixed? DVD-ROM users are directed to a Web page that contains no mention whatsoever of Afrocentricity. Oooops.