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By Indie Means Necessary

The BlackStar Film Festival is an annual celebration of the visual and storytelling traditions of the African diaspora and of global communities of color, showcasing films by black, brown and indigenous people from around the world.

Twitter

@BlackStarFest - 16 hours

RT @WendellPierce: CLEMENCY directed by Chinonye Chukuwu ⁦@ChinonyeC⁩ with an Oscar-worthy performance by Alfre Woodard along with Aldis Ho…

@BlackStarFest - 1 day

RT @StanleyNelson1: Kind of Blue is the album that changed it all for me. I made this film for Miles lovers, but also for those new to his…

Instagram

  • Now available for free streaming: “Afronauts,” (2014) written and directed by @tobogganeer. Click the link in bio @afronauts.film to watch the full short film. ⠀ ⠀ Synopsis: In March 1965, the US and the USSR rush to get the first man on the moon. Thousands of miles away, the Zambia Space Academy hopes to enter the race with their "spacegirl" Matha Mwamba. Based on true events.
  • Final days to check out @fahamupecou’s exhibition at @aampmuseum. “DO OR DIE: AFFECT, RITUAL, RESISTANCE” is on view until Sunday, August 25.⠀ .⠀ .⠀ Repost:⠀ My #PhD dissertation is a traveling exhibition that confronts the visual narrative of death-bound subjectivity and Black masculinity thru the lens of hip-hop and #Yoruba cosmology... now on view at @aampmuseum in #Philly⠀ ⠀ #fahamupecou #fahamupecouistheshit #worldwideheknownforthat
  • New from BlackStar alum @sholaamoo (Dear Mr. Shakespeare, A Moving Image): @thelasttreefilm.⠀ ⠀ Synopsis: #TheLastTreeFilm is the semi-autobiographical story of Femi, a British boy of Nigerian heritage who, after being fostered in rural Lincolnshire, moves to inner-city London to live with his birth mother. In his teens, Femi is struggling with the culture and values of his new environment. Femi must decide which path to adulthood he wants to take, and what it means to be a young black man in London during the early 00s.⠀ ⠀ The film will screen at @britishfilminstitute in London on Saturday, August 31 as part of S.O.U.L Fest, a two-day celebration of black British talent in film.⠀ .⠀ .⠀ .⠀ #nodirectflightldn #bfisouthbank #AfricaLDN
  • "As #ArthurJafa (@anamibia) tells it, “Love Is the Message” came together over the course of a few hours in editing, but it sprang from many years of thinking about how to make films in a vernacular that might intimate the African-American experience as well as popular music could — what Jafa has called “black visual intonation.” After Jafa was released from a commercial project for YouTube in honor of Black History Month (the direction he was taking the film was deemed too dark), he began stringing together archival images — a digital version of what he’d been doing for decades in notebook form, refining his ideas about ways to centralize black life in art apart from Eurocentric ideals. He refers to his juxtaposition of footage he shot himself with found imagery culled from archives and dash cams and unseen corners of the internet — “If my dope register goes off, I use it” — as “affective proximity,” borrowing a term from his friend, the British filmmaker #JohnAkomfrah, and the result challenges viewers to know and feel on a deeper level things we might have thought we had already known and felt." -- @tmagazine⠀ .⠀ .⠀ .⠀ Photograph by Wayne Lawrence. Artwork in background from left: Arthur Jafa, “Bloods,” 2019; Arthur Jafa, still from “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death,” 2016, video; Arthur Jafa, “LeRage,” 2017, color print on dibond, aluminum plate stand; Arthur Jafa, “Ex-Slave Gordon,” 2017, vacuum formed plastic. All artwork courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome.
  • Great news @jennnkiru’s #blacktotechno is available to view in full on YouTube! Click the link in her bio to watch it. We screened this amazing short for its Philadelphia Premiere during our Closing Night Program at #BSFF19 ———————————————— BLACK TO TECHNO is a music documentary charting the anthropological, socio-economical, geopolitical roots of techno from Detroit and how it travelled and translated into becoming the soundtrack to the fall of the wall in Berlin. It features contributions from pioneering spoken-word and hip-hop group The Last Poets and Detroit DJs Stacey Hotwaxx, DJ Minx and DJ Holographic.
  • You voted! Congratulations to the #BSFF19 Audience Award Winners. —————————————————— 2019 Favorite Documentary Feature Warrior Women (Dirs: Elizabeth A. Castle and Christina D. King @andalou00 @winyancastle @warriorwomenfilm) —————————————————— 2019 Favorite Narrative Feature Sprinter (Dir: Storm Saulter @stormsaulter) —————————————————— 2019 Favorite Experimental Film The Cancer Journals Revisited (Dir: Lana Lin) —————————————————— 2019 Favorite Documentary Short Finding Elijah (Dir: Yolonda Johnson-Young @karmelpeach) —————————————————— 2019 Favorite Narrative Short T (Dir: Keisha Rae Witherspoon @quantumkeisha) —————————————————— 2019 Favorite Youth Film (11-17) Closeted (Dir: George Hollyer and Danielle Ridgeway) —————————————————— 2019 Favorite Youth Film (18-22) PETAL (Dir: Derek Yancey Jr. @derek.period)
  • Congratulations to the #BSFF19 Juried Award Winners and Special Recognition Award Winners! —————————————————— Best Feature Documentary Infiltrators, The (Dirs: Cristina Ibarra & Alex Rivera) —————————————————— Best Feature Narrative Selah and the Spades (Dir: Tayarisha Poe @tayarishasaurusrex) —————————————————— Best Experimental Bereka (Dir: Nesanet Teshager Abegaze) —————————————————— Best Short Documentary A Love Song For Latasha (Dir: Sophia Nahli Allison @yagurlsophia) —————————————————— Best Short Narrative Sega (Dir: Idil Ibrahim @i_am_idil) —————————————————— Best Youth (11-17) The Next Stop (Dir: Jalyssa Jimenez) —————————————————— Best Youth (18-22) Wash Day (Dir: Jaida Salmon) —————————————————— 2019 Special Recognition Award: Narrative Presented by HBO Feathers (Dir: A.V. Rockwell @avrockwell) —————————————————— 2019 Special Recognition Award: Documentary Presented by HBO Respect and LOVE (Dir: Angelique Webster @therealannbreel) —————————————————— 2019 Lionsgate/STARZ Producer Award Test Pattern (Producers: Pin-Chun Liu & Shatara Michelle Ford) @testpatternmovie —————————————————— 2019 Richard Nichols Luminary Award Marcia Smith, President of @firelight_media —————————————————— 2019 BlackStar Pitch Higher 15 (Director: Ameha Molla)
  • A heartfelt thank you to everyone who made this year’s BlackStar Film Festival possible! . . . Photos by @embassy730 . . #bsff19 #blackstar19solit #blackstar19litaf #byindiemeansnecessary