Image credit: Daniel Jackson. Courtesy of BlackStar
At this year’s BlackStar Film Festival, Black love and intellectual kinship resounded through Center City as filmmakers, panelists and participants alike mapped ways of collective care, visions for our future, and respect for the present accomplishments and struggles of people on Turtle Island and around the world. Taking place each August in Philadelphia on land stewarded by the Lenni-Lenape people, BlackStar focuses on fiction, nonfiction, and experimental films about and by Black, Indigenous, and non-Black folks of color. With over 96 films over a packed four days, the festival brought out local and international artists, filmmakers, writers, and many more who came together enthusiastically to see and participate in generative presentations of Afrocentric work. Entrancing films, talks, and gatherings filled the schedule of this 13th edition of the festival, functioning as a spirited summit for Black film lovers and their allies.
Talk of Audre Lorde’s work was rife, in between films at the Kimmel Center and after hours at event parties, where her works were quoted IRL and on screen in multitude even prior to the festival’s repertory screening of A Litany For Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995). Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s documentary bears witness to the powerful messages and breakdowns of survivorship and was greeted by a full ass theater and oh so many sighs of recognition and awe throughout as Audre reflects on her mortality, guiding us through an atlas on the manifestation of her creative life. A spotlight conversation following the screening, moderated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs with Ada and Michelle, conjured a feeling of hope and understanding of what joy means for the survival of Black people. Big feelings of witness-ship motivated my movement through spaces where the possibility of more seemed to be at our fingertips and at the tip of every tongue. I was both humbled and elated to be engaged by films that spoke to the wisdom of our livelihoods, full of vibrancy, love, and courage to be ethically aligned with our truths, and to turn out for the Black peoples of the world.
The intimacy and intricate care that BlackStar puts into the organization and accessibility of its annual film festival make it feel like a deeply considered project brought together by so many experienced and attentive organizers. The ability to facilitate joy and safety in a gathering can create exponential space for growth, a bending of space-time that gives folks true time to be free and travel across waves of distant visions. Amidst all the vibrancy and energy of the people of BlackStar, I tried to see as many films as possible and will mention here films that I saw for the first time with audiences. Shout out Seeking Mavis Beacon which also played at the festival and resulted in many reverent reflective flow states. Like the talks, the focus of many of the films was survivorship—they asked how we propel ourselves through truth and ethical pursuit in an age of disintegration and global instability.
Nowhere Near
In Miko Revereza’s Nowhere Near, migratory bubbles float down a river to greet the viewer, layered on top of images of the filmmaker’s grandfather in hospice care, easing us into the hands of Miko’s cinematic logic. The film considers Miko and his ancestors' movements toward new beginnings and bittersweet opportunities. A Filipino filmmaker who grew up across California, he turns his eyes to the dark mundane realities and stresses of life without a visa. The hardened remnants of neocolonialism led Miko to being undocumented in the land he grew up in, a nightmarish frustration of family and state. In his narration, Miko asks whose fault is this, where can he turn? Nowhere Near and its hyper-reflective POV takes us through Miko’s steps as he contemplates the remnants of his life in America and deliberately travels to the Philippines with no road back to Los Angeles. Like the debris on his camera lens, he becomes “a piece of dust from LA [that] made it all the way to Manila.”
The second half of the film alights on the shaky neon abstracts of Manila, enveloping the viewer in Miko’s excitement, apprehension, and wonder at his situation. He talks of being a shitty cinematographer when the camera shakes in his hands as he looks for his ancestors' graves, their enduring spirits askew in the shadows of this new Filipino sun. He searches through the debris of his migratory ancestry and colonial legacies as an undocumented millennial, considering his uprooting and conceivable replanting, his search for what’s lost, and attempts to reconnect. Nowhere Near is full of grief across generations for lives lived and left, lands forgotten, family left behind. In this river, the migratory specks of time, the accumulation of lives we live across lands continue to flow, erode, and build temporary settlements of sentiment, before the current pulls us further down the river.
Rising Up at Night (Tongo Saa)
Through dreams and songs and visions of Congo, the watery street life of Kinshasa permeates the senses in Nelson Makengo’s Rising Up at Night (Tongo Saa). As Kinshasa is submerged in catastrophic flooding and an indefinite power outage, Nelson takes his camera and flashlights on a walk through the dark streets. We see the exuberant street life still alive as dusk turns into a deeper night where holidays and celebrations continue. In one scene, a glow-in-the-dark Santa Clause rolls up in the back of a jeep to bring cheer to the endless days of no electricity. The floods bring water that settles waist-deep in many homes. Nelson brings us through people’s daily routines working around these flooded realities. Tongo Saa was my favorite film of the festival, one that has stuck with me for days—its images of watery surfaces are as reflective as shots of pearlescent dark skin, shining with a spirituality porous enough to travel with you.
People in the film exude a casual comfort in front of Nelson’s camera, in frank conversations with each other as they acknowledge the difficulty of their situations but continue to live life in all its luminous minutiaes. Families joke and play. Kids still gotta look clean and cute for school. The floods and outages spur fervent outdoor communal prayer under battery-powered lights. We see glistening heads bowed in cacophonous prayer, folks contending with debilitating floods and calling upon the lord for mercy. Requests for divine intervention from God to belay a convergence of floods, power loss, global warming, and a tenuous hydroelectric dam funded by imperial core investors. It is often not safe in the dark, especially for femmes already having to navigate the precarity of flooded homes and lives along with the additional threat of being met with shadowed violence in Kinshasa’s unlit streets. Rising Up at Night (Tongo Saa) takes us through all these fluid realities in Kinshasa, showing us the magic and casual tragedies of modern life and the people who keep you company through the storms.
Mambar Pierrette
Floods also echo through the rainy Cameroonian streets of Rosine Mbakam’s first work transitioning from documentary work into fiction, Mambar Pierrette. In Rosine’s intimate documentary stylings, Mambar is a seamstress sewing just enough to get by and is played by Rosine’s real-life cousin, with a cast filled out by other family members. Mambar’s customers are radiant as they try on flattering custom garments at her neighborhood shop. Rosine’s electric framing brings the viewer into a magnetic embrace with Mambar and her community, the joyful dynamism that each of them brings to the world amidst the mundane tragedies of life. Mambar is quietly robbed one night and picks herself back up immediately to get to the family members she cares for. At home, she tries to sleep while she can, incanting “God will help me” as the rains continue to come and flood her home. Waking up to calf-deep waters in her home and shop, she continues her conversation with God: “This day is cursed—I will be spared nothing.”
But Mambar is in communion with all her community. She taps in with an elder auntie who supports her despite others’ criticism and acknowledges that Mambar is part of a different generation that must find ways to do things their own way in order to survive. The film travels in a rhythm of care, tracking Mambar as she rebuffs clients who ask for discounts, a young man trying to convince her to come to a political meeting, and others in her neighborhood. “Art is dead here,” a local dancer tells Mambar, but yet Rosine’s camera and narrative design show us how alive beauty and momentary joy are in Douala. “What a country,” Mambar says. We fall into the casual embrace of oral histories from elders, family pictures around their house, an array of shots of Mambar in her buoyant beauty and rhythms of her sewing studio. A caucasian mannequin outside her shop freaks everybody out, but also causes laughs. The joys and richness that Mambar Pierrette plies are sweet and sometimes unexpected.
Songs From the Hole
Contessa Gayles’s Songs From the Hole (a 2022 IDA Enterprise Production Grantee) was the hit of the festival. Multiple standing ovations punctuated a screening full of audible responses and copious tears. The film tells the story of JJ88, an artist who found his voice and his heart while imprisoned for a murder he committed as a teenager in Long Beach. Contessa’s crafty approach brings scanned prison files, prison phone voiceovers, and childhood photos into rhythmic kinship with JJ88’s album written in and out of solitary, also titled Songs From the Hole. A film made to the rhythms of a soul in recovery, it also conveys the oppressive metronome of the prison industrial complex (PIC) as JJ88’s voiceovers regularly get cut off by jarring and imposed inmate phone time limits.
The album, the art, and the story together function as honest reflections from JJ88 on his turn to violence and where he goes from here. Dream-like reenactments and scenes brought to life from JJ88’s notebooks pair with his songs in a musical fusion that transcends music video or musical, engaging the viewer in a composite intimacy that can transmit the immense power of active accountability to bring forth abolition’s imagined realities. These musical interludes from the album break up the grinding realities of the PIC and its legacies of violence borne out in our communities. The film makes a clear and honest illustration of the brutality of government processes of accountability and the resulting impossibility of healing for victims as well as those who’ve transgressed against them.
But JJ88 shows us how to find and model forgiveness and reconciliation in an abolitionist fashion from inside the belly of the beast. He finds himself tested in the most heart-wrenching ways while in prison, but, guided by God and scripture, finds healing and rehabilitation despite everything the Department of Corrections does to get in his way. Love and hope and the tides that rise in their wake power through the frames of Songs from the Hole toward a cinematic model of abolitionist realities within our grasp.
It Was All a Dream
It Was All a Dream by dream hampton is an awe-spiring and intimate look at the inner thoughts and conversations of some of the most influential figures in 90s hip hop. The film pulls from dream’s personal video archives and diaries from her days as an NYU film student while working with Source magazine and having trusted access to artists like Notorious B.I.G., Method Man, Snoop Dogg, and more. Dream’s writings and reflections punctuate scenes of driving around with the boys, rolling up something to smoke, giggling, and joking while still speaking seriously on life. She documents these stories and moments at the top of the rap game from streets to studios and into the modes of thinking that drive the work.
Dream is the star of this film—giving high level wisdom, an analysis informed by the ability to look back on the history of hip hop from her intimate and critical view. She speaks truth and questions these powerful men and influential storytellers about the ideologies behind their work. It’s thrilling to see dream questioning the motives of young men who have since become corporate entities unto themselves. She acts as the audience’s divine interlocutor at special moments in hip hop history, one who can facilitate critical conversations and work to hold artistic communities accountable. Our collective nostalgia and joy at seeing these cultural heroes get transmuted by a more honest and sober, questioning examination of the culture. The film is a timely gift and recognition of the work and political education that is necessary for intracommunal growth.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
Sparse rhythms, sounds, and images give shape to Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, a fabricated colorblock fantasy of Martinique and, as stated in the film, “ about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered.” Suzanne was a writer and critical interlocutor in the political and surrealist scenes of Martinique whose influence and work (seemingly intentionally) took a back seat to that of her more famous husband—Aimé Césaire, a major poet, politician, and leader of the Négritude movement. The actors in the film perform slow, dreamy recitations in an imagined reading of Suzanne’s life that is hidden from history, from phantom documents that were at one point material and real but lost in her own deliberate destruction of her archive.
Tight close-ups and fluid telephoto shots frame Suzanne and Aimé’s on-screen avatars as the facade of a film production melts away into the dispersed debris of a film set. We see a crew member holding a slate. Sounds bounce between voiceovers, crew noises, and sudden ambient sounds of Miami groves. The viewer’s attention is brought from shots of trees swaying to the winds of an impending storm to an actor reading texts aloud in a film production truck. The film challenges viewers with its soundscapes and long sequences with no life in the frame or even sounds of life. But throughout, the trees speak of a supernatural strength, of the forces of nature that reveal the ephemeral nature of human structures, memory, and history. As storms rage in the distance, we humans read our paper memories of lives lived and no longer remembered but in the created space-times of gatherings—collective recognitions of the supermassive magnitude of consideration that our work requires of one another.
Matazi Weathers is a temporal and spatial film farmer, curator, educator, and filmmaker from Los Angeles always in pursuit of new potentialities. They are the Assistant Curator of Film at LACMA; co-curate Strong-Sissy Black Movie Night, a cinema and political education space; and are founder of Black Bloom, a Black farmers’ cooperative in Los Angeles that provides free education and mentorship to Black folks learning to grow their own medicine.