Where Do We Go from Here?
On a Thursday in Philadelphia, droves of filmgoers trekked to the 14th Annual Blackstar Film Festival, seeking programming reflective of global communities of color. Blackstar’s selections sought to create a living narrative on liberation and an informed collective history by ensuring that the stories presented an honest depiction of culture.
There are chilling scenes from Orison, a themed short film series on divination, prayer, and ancestral offerings that are both visually stunning and deliver on their promise of singularity. Untitled (How High the Moon) (dir. Rashida Bumbray) is a haunting, dreamy reenactment of the story of her mother’s imaginative childhood with her sister as children who could fly. Celestine (Florida Storm) (dir. Allison Janae Hamilton) disarms the senses through wide shots of eerie Spanish moss billowing just before the storm.
Bukra. Director Alex Aljouni. United States, 2024.
However, amid a series of stories featuring subjects unfettered by their oppressors, I noticed that many of this year’s selections of shorts, documentaries, and feature films demonstrated an interesting reflective thread that I am calling, for lack of a better word, “ordinary core.” Thematically, it felt like a nostalgic compilation of scenes curated to disengage the viewer from the prevalence of trauma and distress, turning towards a comfortingly quotidian existence. It’s not to say that the films somehow conjured up an antithesis of conflict by showcasing an overly peaceful utopia; rather, many showcased microcosms that emphasize care and everyday activities over hurt and trauma—a world in which children run errands to exchange a ticket for a soccer ball (Bukra, dir. Alex Alijouni), and a mother braids her child's hair after doing chores—despite their existence within meta-narratives that we all understand to be bleak and harrowing. This year’s films observe the value of the everyday.
In her short film triptych The Volcano Manifesto, Cauleen Smith speaks to the importance of this idea through her experimental, textured imagery. The idea that black existence is what interrupts describing racism and resisting racism. That our existence is defined wholly by participating in a system or dismantling it, but joy, or in this case, living, exists in between those acts, when life is defined by routine dinners and homework and dog walking. However, acknowledging the past is necessary to contextualize the necessity of stillness. In Images de Tunisie (dir. Younès Ben Slimane), the contemporary images of clay making in a Berber village are intercut with a French propaganda film shot there in the 1940s. The clay artisan dutifully warps the earth and seems oblivious to the colonialist scenes, but perhaps the willful ignorance is an act of resistance all its own.
Suburban ethos and refinement are the subject of meticulous observation in the feature documentary The Debutantes (dir. Contessa Gayles). It follows the revival of cotillion in a small town in Ohio, made accessible to students considered leaders in their community. Gayles seems to be asking if we can simultaneously participate in systems we fundamentally disagree with and still reap the benefits of the advantages they present to us. Is it better than not participating at all and missing out on the positive byproducts of the experience?
One debutante drops out due to the outdated heterosexual gender stipulations of having a male escort present you to society, while another elects to sit out of the father-daughter dance, citing its patriarchal complicity, yet her visible disappointment on camera is gut-wrenching, a hollowed understanding that she’s disparaged by her desire to partake in something she doesn’t necessarily believe in. One could argue that these young women are learning skills that shape modern and social survival, but on a larger scale, we are merely witnesses to a commonplace existence.
The Debutantes. Director Contessa Gayles. United States, 2024.
These punctuated portraits of regularity continue throughout the festival run, ranging in settings from those that would typically signal distress or framing subjects in the atypical and watching them behave wholly unmoored. The River (dir. Herrana Addisu), a short film, tells a three-part story about a mother and daughter in Ethiopia, a young girl stammers through the alphabet, shying away from her aggressive instructors in a field with azure skies. Still, the most moving scene is her mother taking a break from helping to make injera so she can draw henna on her daughter and friend who want to play “bride.” It’s a touching moment—a signal of the importance of turning toward connection and intimacy, before it’s too late. What’s surprising is the innate quotidien-ism that settles into a story that is otherwise extraordinarily shot, acted, designed, and colored.
This is speculation on a larger trend in the medium, and given our political climate, a welcome one. An alternate response to unrest is to reshape reality, echoed by our ancestors' desire to envision a future teeming with ideas of radical love, permeating bias and corruption. An urgent need to write a new mythology, for control or escape, is a historic practice of its own. Consider the church choirs that inspired the Motown groups that inspired the funk bands that inspired the eventual cult of Sun-Ra, as is chronologized in We Want the Funk! (dir. Stanley Nelson and Nicole London): radical self-mythologizing that led to worlds so distant from our own that they became cosmic and celestial. The thumpy chords and groovy synths of a funk band are the rhythm of freedom to a generation confined to respectability politics and pressed suits.
Hiding behind an old identity is insufficient in Love, Brooklyn (dir. Rachael Abigail Holder). While Brooklyn gentrifies, Roger misses his writing deadlines, inflation drives the rent up in Casey’s gallery, and the duo’s relationship as exes and friends (Roger is avoidant about his career and feelings) impacts their new romantic prospects. Holder’s portrait of love, loss, and friendship is a gentle reminder that if our problems were displayed to a grimacing audience, jeering at our obvious mistakes, we could move from complacency and strive for a more just world, too.
Hosts for Half a Century. Director Typju Mỹky and André Tupxi Lopes. Brazil, 2025.
Some films name their anger and confront it head-on, like Hosts for Half a Century (dir. Typju Mỹky and André Tupxi Lopes), a documentary short about the Mỹky people, an indigenous group in Brazil, as they reflect on fifty years of contact with the non-Indigenous people of Brazil and assess the changes it’s brought to their livelihood. Their conflict is with a Brazilian company that wants to use their land for corporate construction. The Mỹky people fight back through the local courts, and it’s one of the rare performances (this being a nonfiction entry) from the festival where a subject emphatically resists their adversary, let alone acknowledges them directly.
Blackstar has presented audiences with an interesting proposition: Now that you’ve witnessed so many stories of struggle and all of the different ways that resistance can materialize, are you going to do something about it? What does it mean when the world ends and becomes something new? Does that new thing have to be radical and full of effort to be meaningful, or can it simply exist?
Blackstar Film Festival was held from July 31 through August 3, 2025. Blackstar’s 15th Annual Film Festival will be held from August 6 through August 9, 2026.
