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 Messiah 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.