Nonetheless from Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez’s TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara Faculty of Organizing (2025), which is able to kick off this 12 months’s BlackStar Movie Pageant in Philadelphia (all pictures courtesy BlackStar Movie Pageant)
A prolific storyteller, transformative educator, and devoted political activist, Toni Cade Bambara devoted her life’s work to countering hegemonic institutional energy buildings. Via inventive mentorship and collaboration, literary schooling, and social justice work, the Black feminist author of revolutionary novels reminiscent of The Salt Eaters (1980) and These Bones Are Not My Baby (2000) by no means wavered from her dedication to uplifting these subjected to injustices. “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible,” Bambara famously mentioned in a 1982 interview.
Many years after her premature demise on the age of 56, these phrases have continued to encourage generations of artists and activists. Amongst them are the filmmakers behind TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara Faculty of Organizing (2025), a feature-length documentary kicking off Philadelphia’s 14th annual BlackStar Movie Pageant subsequent Thursday, July 31.
Directed by Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez, who each labored with Bambara on the documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in 4 Voices (1996), the movie retraces the artist’s life and work via interviews with Bambara herself alongside shut mates and colleagues, together with Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, and Haile Gerima.
Nonetheless from Jenn Nkiru’s THE GREAT NORTH (2024)
The movie is only one of 92 productions comprising this 12 months’s lineup at BlackStar, which celebrates unbiased cinema by Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers and media artists from world wide. Working via Sunday, August 3, the competition may even host a wide range of programming, from panel discussions and digital screenings to group occasions.
Bookending the competition on Sunday, August 3, Jenn Nkiru’s 52-minute experimental documentary The Nice North (2024) spotlights the varied communities and cultures that make up the northwest English metropolis of Manchester, with a particular give attention to its Black, Asian, and Irish residents. A mixture of archival footage and new video set to the music of the town’s underground arts scene, the movie makes use of Manchester’s industrial historical past as a launchpad earlier than shifting via Black group areas and zooming out to the remainder of the world.
Nonetheless from Johanné Gómez Terrero’s Sugar Island (2024)
All through the four-day competition, BlackStar may even characteristic a wide range of narrative movies like Johanné Gómez Terrero’s feature-length Sugar Island (2024), which follows the story of an undesirable being pregnant that thrusts Dominican-Haitian teenager Makenya into the cruel realities of maturity. Asaph Luccas’s quick “LWC (Lazy White Cows)” (2025), one other spotlight, tells the story of Ster, a younger Black scholar vulnerable to being “cancelled” after she refers to a White classmate in disparaging phrases.
Asaph Luccas’s 19-minute quick movie, “LWC (Lazy White Cows)” (2025)
In partnership with the Writers In opposition to the Battle on Gaza and the West Philadelphia nonprofit Making Worlds Bookstore, the competition will display screen Mahmoud Ahmed’s well timed 2024 documentary Gazan Tales (غزة التي تطل على البحر). The work, which wrapped manufacturing earlier than Israel’s ongoing bombardment and siege of the area, follows the paths of 4 Palestinian males within the Gaza Strip and provides a complete view of life formed by fixed adaptation to violence and oppression.
Nonetheless from Mahmoud Ahmed’s documentary Gazan Tales (غزة التي تطل على البحر) (2024)
BlackStar’s programming may even showcase a various roster of experimental works. Amongst these productions is Cauleen Smith’s trilogy The Volcano Manifesto (2024), which brings collectively the movies “My Caldera” (2022), “Mines to Caves” (2023), and “The Deep West Assembly” (2024) for a psychedelic meditation that personifies geological varieties and pure occasions.
Along with its sturdy roster of recent works, the competition will provide a screening of Charles Burnett’s poignant portrait of Black life within the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, Killer of Sheep (1978). The filmmaker can be featured in BlackStar’s in-person Highlight Dialog occasion collection alongside Kahlil Joseph, director of the fictional Afrofuturist drama BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS (2025).
Nonetheless from Loren Waters’s 13-minute quick movie, “Tiger” (2024)
Extra data on the programming for this 12 months’s iteration of the BlackStar Movie Pageant might be discovered on its web site.
Maori Karmael Holmes, Blackstar’s chief government and inventive officer, emphasised the significance of cinema’s “restorative and liberatory power,” notably within the current second.
“Each festival has been very special, but this year’s lineup feels especially epic,” Holmes mentioned in a press launch. “I’m looking forward to communing with filmmakers and audiences, sharing a collective laugh or cry.”
Nonetheless from Cauleen Smith’s movie trilogy The Volcano Manifesto (2024)
Nonetheless from Dương Diệu Linh’s Don’t Cry, Butterfly (Mưa trên cánh bướm) (2024)
Nonetheless from Charles Burnett’s debut characteristic Killer of Sheep (1978)
