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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 - 2 days

RT @firelightmedia: One week away from the theatrical premiere of MILES DAVIS: BIRTH OF THE COOL at @FilmForumNYC on Aug 23. Don't miss Q&A…

@BlackStarFest - 2 days

RT @BlitzAmbassador: There are 137 days left in 2019 y'all. That means if you wrote a single page everyday till the end of the year, you wi…

Instagram

  • "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
  • “I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” — #ToniMorrison. Rest in power.
  • Only a few hours left for the eight annual BlackStar Film Festival! Here’s a look back on day 3 of #BSFF19 . . . 🎥 @goldstreetmedia with editing by @arillydontcare 🎵 by Aeon
  • We’re continuing #BSFF19 Day 4 IG Takeover with @marclamonthill who just checked out the Luminary Conversation between the president of @firelight_media and this year’s BlackStar Luminary Award Recipient Marcia Smith, and @DyanaWilliams. —————————————————————- “So I already knew that Marcia Smith was brilliant but she just blessed the crowd with an hour and a half of pure genius. She talked about stories, she talked about her history and how it informed the art that she makes. A lot of times we only think of Stanley Nelson and we don’t realize that his partner is somebody who is equally brilliant and equally talented, and somebody who has really created a space for a whole new generation of artists to thrive. It was amazing, I feel inspired.” — @marclamonthill —————————————————————- In the clip above Marcia talks about Stanley Nelson’s “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool,” documentary which will premiere @FilmForumNYC. #MilesDavisMovie