The BlackStar Film Festival Has a Mission, and Plenty of Ambition
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Arimeta Diop Richard Lawson Savannah Walsh David Canfield Chris Smith Chris Murphy Eric Lutz Paul Chi Bess Levin Condé Nast
“We always want to be at the vanguard,” says founder Maori Karmael Holmes. “We don’t want to replace the bigger festivals. We want to be nipping at the heels.”
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Vanity Fair
BlackStar Film Festival is occupied with time. The 13th iteration of the Philadelphia-based event, which ran August 1–4, took place during both James Baldwin’s 100th birthday and the start of Black August—the monthlong observance celebrating Black political prisoners who lost their lives in the fight for Black liberation.

This confluence of events is not lost on founder Maori Karmael Holmes. She points out that the fest’s name is a Pan-African nod to the Black Star shipping line, founded by political leader and Black nationalist Marcus Garvey. When speaking, she and festival director Nehad Khader reference an almost endless stream of thinkers and revolutionaries: Toni Cade Bambara (a line from The Bombing of Osage Avenue prologues each screening) and Toni Morrison; theorist and poet Fred Moten and curator Legacy Russell; documentarian Louis Massiah and artist Kevin Jerome Everson.

What was initially conceived as a one-off has evolved into BlackStar Projects; the Festival is just one of seven programs Holmes and her team oversee. The docket includes Seen, a biannual print journal and online platform, and a filmmakers lab, as well as exhibitions and year-round screenings.

“We’re not doing this in a vacuum,” Holmes says. “We are not inventing anything. There are so many shoulders that we stand on.” Through its 96 screened films, the festival works to promote a fiercely expansive crop of work produced by Black, brown, and Indigenous filmmakers, members of what BlackStar’s founders call the “global majority.”

“The word ‘minority’ grates on my soul,” Khader says. “It’s made to make us siloed. It’s made for white supremacy to win. Reframing ourselves as a global majority gives us power. Saying ‘Black, brown, and Indigenous’ is a way to not collapse our differences, either.”

“If colonial systems keep learning from each other, then it behooves us to also keep learning from each other and work together,” she continues. “In the Black internationalist tradition, I find so much education about Palestine, as a Palestinian, and that means so much to me. It’s a tradition that we are interested in functioning within and living through, as well as continuing it.”

The festival goes beyond representation. Fractal is a fantastical short directed by Anslem Richardson—a writer on the TV series The Boys—which follows a young deaf boy, Tamir, played by Keivonn Woodard as he navigates tragedy. The story unfolds not unlike an Octavia Butler story, complete with a mysterious creature—the titular Fractal, presented though a combination of animation and puppeteering—that would be at home in her gallery of otherworldly beings. Devoid of ambient noise save for one key moment, the usual sonic horror cues are abandoned for a haunting that’s communicated in the periphery. “You know monsters aren’t real?” Tamir’s older brother signs just before the lurking fear comes into full view for the boys.

But even as the plot reaches its crescendo, Fractal refuses to make a spectacle. This is an event the audience has enough context for; we can fill in the details ourselves. The film shows a clash of Blackness and policing with the added element of disability, a familiar recipe with bleak, recent real-life parallels. The audience’s attention is turned to the emotion cresting over Woodard’s young face, but he also has autonomy. In the final seconds of the film, Woodard looks into and past the camera at the barrel of a gun as the creature comes up, surrounding him.

Another short, Blair Barnes’s Two Sun, is a lyrical poem that bends the notion of a documentary. Barnes’s subject is King Wanza, a South Central Los Angeles artist. Rather than an explicit examination through interviews or voiceover, the film takes the form of a monologue that is also a conversation between King Wanza and himself. Scenes flit between the shoreline and expansive blue skies to a neighborhood corner, Manhattan Place and 109th Street. “I put that shit on,” King Wanza declares in narration. “And I smelled like Black & Milds—that is a hood cologne.” Themes of grief and self-acceptance grow apparent over the repeated lines and lingering shots of Los Angeles. Screened as part of the Anima Shorts block, Two Sun was in a cohort of work invested in the relations between the self and environment.

“We don’t outwardly seek a theme, but we do let the themes of the films that we’re watching speak to us in a way,” Khader says. “Every year, it seems that there are certain things that filmmakers are talking about. We did have a lot about motherhood and also parenthood this year. Much more about climate change this year. And a lot of joyful films too.”

Directed by Al'Ikens Plancher, who’s worked on the sets of Yellowstone and The Chi, Boat People is not an obviously joyful film. Shot in greyscale, it’s inspired by the 1991 mass exodus from Haiti following the military overthrow of the nation’s president. The US detained the refugees in camps at Guantánamo Bay, calling the interned asylum-seekers “boat people.” The plot focuses on one of the Haitian refugees as she survives the inhumane conditions at Guantánamo Bay over weeks. The bulk of the story takes place in her bare tent, which over time is spotted with scraps of cloth and quilts hung on the sheet “walls.” We realize she is being tested on, and after questioning this treatment, she further exercises what power she holds. Days into a hunger strike, the camera closes in on our protagonist’s resigned face, serene and watching something. In a quick cut, we see the sky peeking through an opening in the tent roof, the first and only color in the film: blue.

“How are we breaking the form?” Holmes says of BlackStar’s mission. “How are we preserving histories? How are we moving toward liberation with this project? It was an emergent happening that moved us into being more expansive. That makes us a little hard to read, because there is a way that you move in the art world, and there’s a way that you move in Hollywood. And we are kind of refusing to move in either, fully, and we’re sort of straddling this world, which is part of our whole project. It’s a blur. This whole thing is not actually to be legible.”

The team noted an uptick in industry attendance compared to festivals in years past. It’s “both exciting and also very different,” says Holmes. “There’s been ways that the bigger festivals have been borrowing from us, but I think for the future, just for it to be really clear: Who’s actually at the vanguard? We always want to be at the vanguard. We don’t want to replace the bigger festivals. We want to be nipping at the heels.”

A veteran of BlackStar, filmmaker and artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, always knew The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire would have its North American premiere at the festival. “It’s a very important context for the work,” she says. Based in part on the essay “Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics” by Terese Svoboda, a postpartum actor, played by Zita Hanrot (who actually had just given birth to her second child when she shot the project), and a small group of filmmakers are making a film about Martinician anti-colonial and Surrealist scholar and writer Suzanne Césaire. Motell Gyn Foster plays the actor opposite Hanrot, who is preparing for the Aimé Césaire role. Ballad is a film about filmmaking, an anti-biopic on a subject who refused legacy: Suzanne Césaire wrote seven essays and then stopped, never publishing again after 1945. In researching for the film, Hunt-Ehrlich interviewed Césaire’s descendants, who said the scholar kept writing but threw everything she produced away.

“There’s just these seven essays by her, and they’re so fierce and there’s so much desire in them. And then it just stops. How could it stop? How could you have so much talent and just decide to stop?” the director asked. The film interrogates this question, implicating the viewer through Hanrot’s repeated direct addresses. It’s dense, shot on film about an esoteric subject, uses literary discourse as dialogue, has minimal blocking, and is a meta commentary on its own form—yet Ballad never feels overwrought. Scored by the incessant chatter of bugs and a French Caribbean color palette, there is a palpable heat and gloss to scenes that do not, on their surface, appear to be about pleasure.

“People think that people like me, who make the films I do about postcolonial writers in the 1940s, that we don’t care about pleasure. But I care immensely about your pleasure,” Hunt-Ehrlich says. “Otherwise, I would just write a book, or I’d just be a historian.”

The film fits well into Hunt-Ehrlich’s fixed attention on the interior, intellectual lives of Black women. She laments the choice Black filmmakers often come up against, being forced to pick between spaces that care about form and those that value Blackness. “BlackStar cares about both,” Hunt-Ehrlich says. “I believe one day we’ll look back, and BlackStar will really show a continuity of a whole lineage of filmmakers from the Haile Gerimas to the Jenn Nkirus and the Ja’Tovia Garys.”