The year 1977 was a banner year for the movies for more than one reason.

It’s the year Woody Allen released Annie Hall, which many critics call the prolific director’s greatest film. It’s also the year George Lucas launched his multi-million-dollar Star Wars saga, and Steven Spielberg released Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

That same year, a University of California — Los Angeles film student named Charles Burnett put out a little movie called Killer of Sheep — black and white, budgeted for $10,000 and featuring a cast of untrained unknowns.

Fast-forward three decades later and nearly any critic who has seen Sheep puts the notoriously elusive film in the company of not only the best movies of that year, but the best of modern American cinema.

After a painstaking restoration at Burnett’s alma mater, Killer of Sheep is becoming not so elusive in a small but steady nationwide run. It makes its way to Athens tonight and Sunday as part of the 2007 Athens International Film and Video Festival.

Akil Houston, a visiting professor in Ohio University’s African American Studies Department, helped bring Killer to Athens and said it is a landmark movie for Africana cinema that has stayed underground for more than its status as a student film.

The expensive music rights to the film’s soundtrack have kept it from a video or DVD release until recently, and the stigma of being a student film — by a then-unknown black filmmaker, no less — has kept Burnett’s movie from being widely heralded as a work on par with other landmark American movies.

The documentary-like film takes a look at the life of a black slaughterhouse worker living in working-class L.A. in the mid-1970s. Houston said Killer looks at the psychological effects of living in a classless, raceless society in a way that sidesteps being romantic or preachy.

But beyond Killer’s fly-on-the-wall realism, it also captures black American life a decade after integration, showing that the Civil Rights Movement might have made great legal strides, but it did little for social mobility, Houston said.

“It’s probably one of the most realistic portrayals of that segment of society — the working poor,” he said.

Killer of Sheep shows at 7:30 p.m. today and 9:30 Sunday. Both shows are at The Athena, 20 S. Court St.