BlackStar Film FestivalBlackStar Film Festival
  • About Us
    • Board
    • Program Committee
    • Program Guides
    • Staff
  • Submit
    • 2019 Submissions
    • Pitch Session
    • Youth Submissions
  • Festival
    • Donors
    • Films
    • Jurors
    • Partners
    • Press
    • Schedule
    • Sponsors
  • Attend
    • Code of Conduct
    • Hotels
    • Media Credentials
    • Tickets & Passes
    • Venues
  • Support
    • Advertising
    • Donate
    • Intern
    • Membership
    • Sponsorship
    • Staff Opportunities
    • Vendors
    • Volunteer
  • Contact

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 - 1 hour

RT @StanleyNelson1: Proud to tell Harriet's story in an upcoming documentary. @marylandpubtv https://t.co/jyHQTGjfMD

@BlackStarFest - 5 hours

RT @davidmakesman: Want to watch the series premiere of #DavidMakesMan for FREE? We're streaming the first episode on @OWNTV's YouTube chan…

Instagram

  • 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
  • “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