Celebrating its 13th annual iteration in Philadelphia, the BlackStar Film Festival, which nurtures Black, Brown, and Indigenous storytellers, is back next month with expanded programming and productions from 90 filmmakers perspectives have been historically neglected in the industry.
Filmmakers Shatara Michelle Ford and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, whose feature films anchor this year’s festival, took the stage during a press preview at Manhattan’s NeueHouse earlier this month. Ford, an African-American filmmaker from the Midwest who will kick off BlackStar’s lineup with the world premiere of Dreams in Nightmares (2024), elaborated on their desire to create not only a quintessential “roadtrip movie” but a specifically Black and queer take on the 1984 film Paris, Texas.
In conversation with critic Zeba Blay and the film’s lead actor, Denée Benton, Ford explained that the throughline for Dreams in Nightmares is searching for a friend who somehow fell off the grid, nodding to the protagonist of Paris, Texas and his search for the mother of his child. Recounting their own experiences with a disconnected friend who passed away while production was in progress, the filmmaker described the project’s development as a form of “deep improvisation, but also very structured,” referencing the style and work of English director Mike Leigh.
Similarly investigating a figure lost to time, the North American premiere of Hunt-Ehrlich’s first feature film, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), will bookend the festival on August 4. The Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker examines the life and work of Martinican anti-colonial feminist writer and surrealist Suzanne Césaire, whose legacy is often overshadowed by that of her husband, poet and politician Aimé Césaire.
Citing her interest in the pre-independence Caribbean generation, Hunt-Ehrlich delves into Césaire’s work through the fictional lens of an actor discovering her poetry three months after giving birth. Shot entirely on 16mm film among the palm trees of South Florida and supplemented with archival footage, the curious, open-ended film draws attention to an artist who, as the filmmaker said in an interview with BlackStar’s Seen journal, “didn’t want to be remembered.”
Beyond the opening and closing films, the myriad productions screening during this year’s festival are sectioned into categories ranging from experimental and narrative films to documentaries. Among these is Mohamed Jabaly’s Life Is Beautiful (2023), in which the Palestinian filmmaker cinematizes his seven-year fight to return to his family in Gaza following the border’s closing and his visa issues while indefinitely held up in Norway for an exchange filmmaking program. Three episodes of director Darius Clark Monroe’s five-part series Dallas (2019), examining the city through five public representatives, will take center stage during the second half of the festival.
In addition to ticketed in-person and virtual screenings from August 1 to 4, the festival will host panels tackling various topics related to filmmaking, a yoga class, parties, and other events throughout.
