BlackStar Film Festival Announces Philadelphia Dates for August

BlackStar will screen over 90 films by Black independent filmmakers.

The BlackStar Film Festival is coming to Philadelphia. This week Maori Karmael Holmes, the group’s artistic director and CEO announced the project will take place in Philly for the week of August 20-26.

Holmes recently curated presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and The Whitney Museum’s 2019 Biennial. In June, Holmes was named one of Black Public Media’s 40 Media Game Changers for 2020. This year, the festival will present over 90 films, in addition to live panels (free and open to the public for digital consumption). Submit requests for credentials on the BlackStar website.

The 2019 festival drew nearly 10,000 attendees.

“More important than the numbers,” the group said in a statement, “or the outstanding amount of talent on display, is the community that forms around the festival. Holmes describes each year as feeling like a summer cmap, where “people meet, collaborations are born, and then you’ll see the work they’ve made together screening at the festival a couple years later.” This sort of spirit aligns with BlackSar’s wider mission–to build a supportive, inclusive network that takes action, advocating for substantial change across the wider media arts landscape. As in literature, the tendency is to categorize BIPOC filmmakers’ work as Black or brown first and film second, resulting in a huge array of films to be funneled perpetually out of the mainstream. BlackStar’s been a showcase of that talent for nearly a decade now, a catalogue of the industry’s failing, and a measure of how far they need to come to catch up.”