BlackStar Film Festival 2024

Join us for the BlackStar Film Festival, an annual celebration of the visual and storytelling traditions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people from around the world. Taking place August 1-4 at PAFA, with additional screenings, parties, and events at various venues across Philadelphia, the festival will screen 90 films from 40 countries over the four days. 

Learn more about the festival and buy tickets today!

AUGUST 1st

Statism (Shorts) | Shorts Program
August 1st 1:30 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
Going head to head with repressive state apparatus, and who we become in the process of doing so. Creative, embodied, stubborn, and emergent.

barrunto | Experimental
August 1st 4:30 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
dir. by Emilia Beatriz
From its deep vibration tracks to the nonlinear narrative, barrunto is a film that attempts to activate sensations and modes of being with the world and in connection beyond Western frameworks of knowledge, a sensorial translation meant to be felt more than understood.

AUGUST 2nd

Envisages (Shorts) | Shorts Program
August 2nd 11:00 AM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
Imagining otherwise is at the heart of this film program. Fantasies about destroying capitalist edifices, rectifying past harm, and the tenacity of resistance take front and center.

Extant (Shorts) | Shorts Program
August 2nd 2:00 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
Suffering through the worst of the violence, and surviving to tell the tale. Memorializing the people and circumstances that brought us into our present.

Our Land, Our Freedom | Feature Documentary
August 2nd 5:00 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
dir. by Meena Nanji & Zippy Kimundu
Our Land, Our Freedom tells the story of two extraordinary Kenyan women — a mother and daughter, Mukami and Wanjugu Kimathi.

Anthropogenic (Shorts) | Shorts Program
August 2nd 8:30 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
Journeys through various man-made climate disasters, and a profile of the communities at the center who are left to live with it.

AUGUST 3rd

Rising Up at Night (Tongo Saa) | Feature Documentary
August 3rd 10:30 AM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
dir. by Nelson Makengo
Kinshasa and its inhabitants are in darkness. They wait and struggle to get access to light.

Dallas, 2019 | Feature Documentary
August 3rd 1:30 PM 
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
dir. by Darius Clark Monroe
Dallas, 2019 is an intimate, experiential and observational five-part series that studies and reveals how citizens are socialized, shaped and formed within a society.

Indomitable (Shorts) | Shorts Program
August 3rd 5:30 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
Communities whose resistance cannot and will not be subdued by the forces that are determined to break them. Perseverance in action.

Propitiate (Shorts) | Shorts Program
August 3rd 8:30 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
A shorts program about parenting, reparenting, and being parented, and the transitions that take place when we leave (behind) our parents' ideals and make sense of the world on our own terms.

AUGUST 4th

Bye Bye Tiberias | Feature Documentary
August 4th 10:00 AM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
dir. by Lina Soualem
Years after leaving her Palestinian village to pursue an acting career in France, Emmy-nominated Hiam Abbass (Succession, Ramy, Blade Runner 2049) returns home with her daughter in this intimate documentary about four generations of women and their shared legacy of separation.

The New Man & Syppyt Suruktar (Lost Letters) | Feature Documentary
August 4th 12:30 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
The New Man directed by Carlos Yuri Ceuninck, tells the story of a man who has lived for more than 30 years in an abandoned village in Cape Verde at the bottom of a deep valley, between the sea and the mountains. Syppyt Suruktar, directed by Kyhynngy Oyuur, tells a story about several friends who fell into a hole and found themselves in another realm, where capitalist and exploitative powers destroyed many forms of life.

Concatenate (Shorts) | Shorts Program
August 4th 3:30 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
Vertical connections — with our elders and ancestors — and horizontal connections — with our peers and friends — shape who we are and who we can become.

Bilocation (Shorts) | Shorts Program
August 4th 6:30 PM
John and Richanda Rhoden Arts Center
Both here and there. Diasporic narratives of people who have the ability to exist in two places at the same time.

More Info

This is a facility rental event presented by an independent organization.