Don’t call it the Black Sundance.
Although dubbed as such by Ebony magazine, the BlackStar Film Festival, now in its 11th year, is a cultural institution in its own right. Sharing a similar focus on independent cinema with its Park City counterpart, BlackStar — which kicks off Wednesday in Philadelphia with a slate of 77 features and shorts from around the world — sets itself apart from other festivals in part by emphasizing the work produced exclusively by “Black, Brown and Indigenous artists. But as a regular at the festival, I have always been struck by its ambitious rapprochement between cultural specificity, social justice and avant-garde, which makes it a cinematic experience exciting, expansive and revealing.
Founded by Maori Karmael Holmes in 2012, it was designed as a unique event to showcase film noir that hadn’t screened in the Philadelphia area. “I had just returned from Los Angeles and felt like there was a void in Philadelphia for these particular works,” Holmes told me. “And I started collecting films that hadn’t been shown in the area that were made in 2011 or 2012, and I very quickly had a list of 30 films, so I pivoted to make some a film festival.”
Holmes, who is now artistic director and managing director of BlackStar Projects, the organization behind the festival, explained, “It was just meant to be this one-time celebration.” But more than 1,500 people showed up, and after the festival was mentioned by Ebony as well as director Ava DuVernay, in an interview with The New York Times, “all of a sudden we had outrageous attention, and people people asked: ‘When is the next one?’ ”
The gathering quickly gained a reputation as a go-to festival for emerging and established black experimental filmmakers. Terence Nance, perhaps more than any other director, knows this. Creator of the television series “Random Acts of Flyness”, his feature films and short films have been presented at the festival every year since its launch.
“I would say BlackStar was fundamental to me,” Nance told me. “Before the pandemic, it was this annual summer touchpoint in Philly for those of us interested in the black cinema project to come together, kick it off, and watch things that pursue a language and a philosophy and a way of being black cinema. It simply does not exist anywhere else and on this scale.
But it’s also an opportunity to share new work and receive critical feedback, making it a rare space for filmmakers of color, especially those pushing the boundaries of their form. An experimental short by Nance and director Rikki Wright, titled “Vortex,” will debut at the festival this year. “People will tell you your movie was amazing but also what went wrong,” Nance explained. “There I think it is possible to enter these conversations safely, or perhaps an even better word is with to like. I think that’s how communities refine and stick together.
The festival, named after Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey’s international shipping company offers audiences unique access to deeply political and highly experimental films from across the African diaspora. “What I’m really proud of is BlackStar’s global perspective,” said festival director Nehad Khader. “We are interested in the stories of black Americans, but we are also very interested in the stories of black people from the continent and the Caribbean, from Latin America and Canada.” And while the festival has always featured filmmakers of color (Khader is a Palestinian-American director herself), their inclusion is now an explicit part of the selection process. (The organization received 1,200 submissions this year alone.)
“BlackStar started out focusing on black cinema, then expanded into brown and indigenous cinema as well,” Khader noted. “Now we don’t just have black stories from Asia and the Arab world, but also Indigenous stories from Australia and Peru. It comes from a philosophy that we are the world’s majority. We think of ourselves that way.
This year’s program includes films that are both socially relevant and fantastical, futuristic and family-friendly.
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds”, for example, is a tender and intimate Chadian drama about a single mother, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), and her struggle to help her 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), obtaining a safe abortion in a country where it is illegal. While the film speaks to a larger battle over reproductive rights, it is also a warm, tightly woven narrative that transports us to the outskirts of Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, and shows us the dynamism and vulnerability of female life in this predominantly Muslim country. . “Haroun has a knack for distilling volumes of meaning into his direct, lucid, and balanced visuals,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review in February, “which he uses to complement and illuminate the minimalist, naturalistic dialogue.”
In many ways, French filmmaker Alain Gomis’ documentary “Rewind & Play” seems to be all about dialogue. It’s because of its premise: In 1969, the great bebop pianist Thelonious Monk was interviewed for hours under the warm lights of a Parisian television studio by fellow musician, Henri Renaud. But rather than replicate the false sense of camaraderie Renaud strove for, Gomis mixes the original footage with excerpts from the archives to both expand our appreciation of Monk’s genius and critique the way the white Renaud (and therefore the mass media) sought to shape and create stereotypical representations of the black avant-garde. Gomis reveals how Monk’s silence (the only time he shares his opinion, Renaud tells the producer, “I think it’s better if we erase him”) worked as a strategy to circumvent Renaud’s racialized gaze and affirm Monk’s agency and artistry beyond.
Experimentation dominates “One Take Grace”, the first documentary by South African actor and director Lindiwe Matshikiza. The film is the culmination of a decade-long collaboration with 58-year-old black South African housekeeper Mothiba Grace Bapela. After Bapela’s daily work, revealing her past trauma and exploring her aspirations to become an actress herself, the film uses different lenses, including a fisheye, to reveal the rituals and rules that govern Bapela’s life. The result: a dynamic, curious and insightful portrait of a charismatic figure who might normally go unnoticed. Similar themes of visibility and gender inform the program of shorts “Locomote,” which includes trans activist Elle Moxley’s political coming-of-age story “Black Beauty,” and the experimental “Conspiracy by Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. studio on the eve of its landmark exhibition at the United States Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Such diversity in geography, genre and narrative style is one of the main reasons British-Nigerian filmmaker Jenn Nkiru, best known for directing Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning video “Brown Skin Girl”, regularly makes the pilgrimage to BlackStar. Another is the sense of community it fosters, which makes it more of what she calls “one big, beautiful family reunion.” She said: “Even though it’s a festival, there’s such a level of concern for people’s work and well-being, and it’s very telling to me of what I imagine the black cinema.
It will be the festival premiere of his “Out/Side of Time,” a short film about a fictional black family in the 19th century community of Seneca Village in New York City. Originally commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” it stands out for its five-channel black-and-white video format played on what looks like a 1990s television. 1950. At BlackStar, Nkiru’s non-linear, cross-generational story will be part of a larger conversation about the form, temporality, and visual language of contemporary black cinema.
“I find BlackStar to be very experimental in what it presents and what it celebrates,” she said, adding later, it’s “important because it serves as a reminder of the potential of black cinema and what we can do, not only in our artistic creation, but also in the building of our nation.
The BlackStar Film Festival runs Wednesday through Sunday in Philadelphia. For more information, visit blackstarfest.org.