A prolific storyteller, transformative educator, and devoted political activist, Toni Cade Bambara devoted her life’s work to countering hegemonic institutional energy constructions. By means of inventive mentorship and collaboration, literary training, and social justice work, the Black feminist author of revolutionary novels reminiscent of The Salt Eaters (1980) and These Bones Are Not My Youngster (2000) by no means wavered from her dedication to uplifting these subjected to injustices. “As a cultural employee who belongs to an oppressed folks, my job is to make revolution irresistible,” Bambara famously stated in a 1982 interview.
A long time after her premature dying on the age of 56, these phrases have continued to encourage generations of artists and activists. Amongst them are the filmmakers behind TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara Faculty of Organizing (2025), a feature-length documentary kicking off Philadelphia’s 14th annual BlackStar Movie Competition subsequent Thursday, July 31.
Directed by Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez, who each labored with Bambara on the documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in 4 Voices (1996), the movie retraces the artist’s life and work via interviews with Bambara herself alongside shut mates and colleagues, together with Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, and Haile Gerima.
The movie is only one of 92 productions comprising this 12 months’s lineup at BlackStar, which celebrates unbiased cinema by Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers and media artists from around the globe. Operating via Sunday, August 3, the competition may also host quite a lot of programming, from panel discussions and digital screenings to group occasions.
Bookending the competition on Sunday, August 3, Jenn Nkiru’s 52-minute experimental documentary The Nice North (2024) spotlights the varied communities and cultures that make up the northwest English metropolis of Manchester, with a particular give attention to its Black, Asian, and Irish residents. A mixture of archival footage and new video set to the music of town’s underground arts scene, the movie makes use of Manchester’s industrial historical past as a launchpad earlier than transferring via Black group areas and zooming out to the remainder of the world.
All through the four-day competition, BlackStar may also function quite a lot of narrative movies like Johanné Gómez Terrero’s feature-length Sugar Island (2024), which follows the story of an undesirable being pregnant that thrusts Dominican-Haitian teenager Makenya into the tough realities of maturity. Asaph Luccas’s quick “LWC (Lazy White Cows)” (2025), one other spotlight, tells the story of Ster, a younger Black scholar vulnerable to being “cancelled” after she refers to a White classmate in disparaging phrases.
In partnership with the Writers In opposition to the Battle on Gaza and the West Philadelphia nonprofit Making Worlds Bookstore, the competition will display screen Mahmoud Ahmed’s well timed 2024 documentary Gazan Tales (غزة التي تطل على البحر). The work, which wrapped manufacturing earlier than Israel’s ongoing bombardment and siege of the area, follows the paths of 4 Palestinian males within the Gaza Strip and presents a complete view of life formed by fixed adaptation to violence and oppression.
BlackStar’s programming may also showcase a various roster of experimental works. Amongst these productions is Cauleen Smith’s trilogy The Volcano Manifesto (2024), which brings collectively the movies “My Caldera” (2022), “Mines to Caves” (2023), and “The Deep West Meeting” (2024) for a psychedelic meditation that personifies geological varieties and pure occasions.
Along with its sturdy roster of latest works, the competition will supply a screening of Charles Burnett’s poignant portrait of Black life within the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, Killer of Sheep (1978). The filmmaker can be featured in BlackStar’s in-person Highlight Dialog occasion sequence alongside Kahlil Joseph, director of the fictional Afrofuturist drama BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS (2025).
Extra data on the programming for this 12 months’s iteration of the BlackStar Movie Competition may be discovered on its web site.
Maori Karmael Holmes, Blackstar’s chief government and inventive officer, emphasised the significance of cinema’s “restorative and liberatory energy,” significantly within the current second.
“Every competition has been very particular, however this 12 months’s lineup feels particularly epic,” Holmes stated in a press launch. “I’m wanting ahead to communing with filmmakers and audiences, sharing a collective chortle or cry.”
