Before the credits end, before the lights go up, a single voice calls, “Free, free.” Without hesitation, a packed film audience responds: “Palestine!” There are too few places, especially in the US, in which a commitment to liberation and life for all oppressed peoples rings with such clarity. The BlackStar Film Festival is one of them. The Philadelphia-based gathering has the objective of building “a liberatory world in which a vast spectrum of Black, Brown and Indigenous experiences is irresistibly celebrated in arts and culture.” This year’s edition contrapuntally coincides with the US 250th anniversary. While the state’s commemorative events continue to dismiss its founding as a settler colony built on genocide and enslavement, BlackStar is an invitation to confront historical harms and remake present conditions.
What turned out to be a series of chants following Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 (2026) reflected the festival’s longstanding character as well as the contemporary terrain—echoing kindred responses such as the record-breaking standing ovation for Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
Inclusive of unplanned audience reactions, film festivals are a public cultural forum that serves as a barometer for local and global states of affairs. Cohering with its founding principles, the decolonial surge of 2020 led BlackStar to institute an audiovisual land acknowledgement, establishing its location on land stewarded by the Lenni-Lenape. The video frames the festival in “a lineage of anticolonial struggle” and global indigeneity, while meaningfully acknowledging that such gestures do not amount to what must be a material process of decolonization.
BlackStar was created in 2012 by Maori Karmael Holmes, under a name which carries the political and cultural signature of Pan-Africanism. With an impressive—if retroactively modest—initial showcase of 40-something Afro-diasporic films, 15 years in, the festival screened over 90 by artists from varied backgrounds representing the global majority. Now, it is common enough to hear it called the “Black Sundance,” reiterating a trope of nominal Black “fill-in-the-blank-ism.” Conceding that the comparison does correlate with a rise in prestige and recognition, it reiterates a tiresome deference to a white standard that itself goes unnamed. That is precisely the opposite of what BlackStar has created: a place where the plural identities, aesthetic traditions, and cultural work of those marked as “minority” and “marginalized” are the norm.
* * *
Political and historical seriousness are central to the festival, inviting critical inquiry. There are consequential disparities between the models that inspired BlackStar and the contemporary landscape in which it operates. No single endeavor can make up for the absence of the national infrastructures and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. As formerly colonized territories claimed their sovereignty and mobilized internationalist solidarities across what used to be called the Third World, they produced a new cultural front. It took shape as the South American-born radical film movement of Third Cinema, the First Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, Tashkent International Festival of the Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and FESPACO (Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou). These assemblies were important as a physical meeting point for not only cultural workers but guerilla fighters, activists, and political officials, facilitating the sorts of exchanges that were beyond the capability of contemporary communication technologies. Film festivals served the needs of ideological battles, operating as a way to coordinate transnational political agendas and articulate emergent political identities through networks of solidarity.
While funding was never uncomplicated, much was done with little. A crucial resource was the support of newly independent states and national governments, who saw culture as part of their struggles for liberation. There were no brand partners nor corporate sponsors. While operating within newly defined limits, some inheritors of that legacy have chosen scrappy DIY approaches as a guardrail against the financial pressures and necessary compromises of scaling up. BlackStar evidently has different ambitions. What results is both contradictory and consistent: in addition to its increasingly ample scope of programming are glossy publicity materials and many options of merchandise; filmmakers are well-compensated (better than in better-resourced festivals, modelling what should be an industry standard); programmers, staff, and volunteers alike express a clear sense of collective dedication; ruling foundations are amongst its funders; its taglines remain “By Indie Means Necessary” and “Cinema for Liberation.”
What does it mean to claim and maintain liberatory independence in a cultural landscape cloaked in the murk of careening fascisms and punitive censorship?
Film festivals have reflected both the renewed action following the escalation of genocidal violence against Palestinians as well as counterinsurgent measures to quell it. Early on after October 2023, most cultural institutions in the Global North took their cue from the states that house them, couched within the spectrum of cowardly lassitude to unvarnished complicity. Dissent was ignored, sanitized, and suppressed, with changes often coming late and meagerly. There have yet been strengthening avenues of organizing.
Started a little over 20 years ago, PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) grew out of the larger BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, which calls for withdrawing investments from Israel’s apartheid—whether through buying power, institutions, art, and sporting events, trade, or arms. Antithetical to the economic warfare the US imposes on Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, it uses economic leverage as an emancipatory tool. As its name indicates, PACBI directly touches on the activities of the film world, offering guidelines and education to inform disengagement from Israeli cultural activities, such as production funding by Zionist lobbies or subtler forms of narrative normalization. While not without its own inevitable internal frictions, it creates a common baseline through which to formalize and unite actions—filmmakers removing their work from certain festivals, connecting signatories such as the NYC-based listings and publishing platform Screen Slate (which signed on in September 2024), or directly putting on events such as the fourth edition of Queer Cinema for Palestine that took place this year.
BlackStar announced its commitment to PACBI in May 2024, refusing to concede its political and ethical tenets even during an acute juncture of ethnonationalist agitation, state repression, and unpredictable lunacy. The festival takes seriously the question of how to not only declare but uphold a political line. Just as the South African anti-apartheid struggle on which it was modelled, the Palestinian BDS calls on a chorus of transnational solidarities. The common fabric tying together this year’s films was the experiences of domination that are neither interchangeable nor equivalent but relational—solidarities forged in grief and brutality that might be repurposed otherwise. The festival’s attendees, staff, contract workers, and volunteers have a meaningful crossover with people committed to a variety of organizing efforts. Without dismissing the richness of Q&As and public-facing conversations, the very fact of being in the same place allowed for more granular exchanges around the difficulties of metabolizing political projects through often hostile institutions. BlackStar offered a place for nascent and ongoing conversations about collaborative screenings across borders; exchanging information to redistribute resources and repatriate cinematic materials whose fates have been the same as other kinds of colonial lootings; venting, gossiping, and consoling. Discarding the sanctimony of silence that defines a certain type of spectatorial culture, many BlackStar screenings were filled with hums, verbal reactions, loud laughter, and chatter. Fittingly, during the 2026 edition, oral testimonies, songs, polyphonic narratives, and poems were the cinematic bridge across the festival’s programming.
* * *
As voices interlinked and crossed the boundary between film and audience after the screening of Palestine 36, they materialized what endures in spite of displacement, erasure, and destruction. Drawing their long arc of struggle from the 1930s into today, the oral delivery of Aida Kaadan’s short Another Day Shall Come (Sayajea’ Yawmon Akhar, 2026) pieces together voice messages from Palestinians scattered within the 1948 borders. The film counterposes the Zionist state’s looming infrastructures, soldiers marching down urban streets, and overcrowded beaches, creating a varnish of normalized occupation with a vocal rescripting by Palestinians. Their voices fill in for the physical absence of expulsion, however partial, memories of what used to be their life on their land, and yearnings for return.
For their overlapping audiences, Kaadan’s film recalled Louis Massiah’s Tenants of Lenapehocking in the Age of Magnets (2026). Shown a day earlier, it looks to the indigenous caretakers of other stolen lands. Beginning with photographs of what was delineated as Fairmont Park in 19th-century Philadelphia, the voiceover describes the removal of the Lenape people from their land as an attempt to sever what could never truly be separated. Similar to the architectural documentation of Another Day Shall Come, it pointedly contrasts images of the park with a public school’s carceral façade. Tenants of Lenapehocking begins with Chief Robert Redhawk Ruth telling his “squirrel story,” infusing the overall work with the old modes of storytelling. As a premiere by a local director, the film exemplifies how BlackStar remains attached to its roots. Massiah has been a filmmaker, teacher, and stalwart pillar of cinema as a community project in North Philadelphia, where he grew up, for four decades, having founded the Scribe Video Center in 1982 and serving as a meaningful influence for members of the festival team.
Interlinked with returning the history of the land to its original caretakers, Massiah’s film tells a story of Black life-making, moving through school districts, music stores, and churches, a child’s fascination with space, and cycles of forced movement. The last speaker, Karen Warrington, describes a present-day expansion of colonial territorialism—gentrification—relating how North Philadelphia has been erased and damned by the media, renamed “the Badlands.” Massiah’s multi-voiced documentary chronicles the living memories and testimonies of what the neighborhood means to those who hold onto it as a home. At the screening, people in the audience recognized their grandparents, and the film’s narrators were present in the theater. While the film will resonate with spectators elsewhere, there is no equivalent to its screening at BlackStar in Philadelphia. With inside jokes and a deeply felt sense of rootedness, the premiere of Tenants of Lenapehocking produced a powerful layering of people and place, even preceding and exceeding what could be projected onscreen.
* * *
BlackStar has succeeded in honoring its commitment to Philadelphia while expanding an internationalism deeply invested in remembrance. Much like Massiah transmits the memories of elders, Iyabo Kwayana’s lyrical short Old Man River (2026) puts together the recollections of her centenarian father, Eusi Kwayana, the Guyanese political thinker and activist nicknamed the “Sage of Buxton.” The film is named after Paul Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River,” with the now blind elder singing along to the militant actor’s sonorous baritone. Through echoes of song, political proclamations, and recited slogans, Eusi Kwayana revisits the history of class struggle and revolution in Guyana. The layered cinematic portrait renders sound as a carrier for the material and the spiritual, evoking the passage between generations as he cradles his great-grandchild amidst the memories of his place in a tradition of Pan-African thought and organizing. Iyabo Kwayana’s film is an echoing sonic palimpsest of political and familial inheritances.
BlackStar’s programming acts as a synthetic connector of Black liberation histories, from the Caribbean to the African continent. Haile Gerima’s quintet Black Lions — Roman Wolves: The Children of Adwa frames a war over territory, narrative, and memory as Ethiopians came into a collective, historical consciousness against the incursions of Fascist Italy. Monumental in scale and breadth, the documentary series is the cinematic translation of an epic poem, a history remembered and recited. Here too, familial and intergenerational ties are foundational. Gerima inherited his calling from his father, Abba Gerima Tafere, a poet, historian, and bookseller who made critical contributions to the intermingled history of Ethiopia and Italy. Part Four begins with children and elders chanting, performing the transmission of self-determination as an intergenerational exchange. As a sung history, Gerima’s series recounts the span from the 1896 Battle of Adwa through to the Ethiopian victory that ended Italian occupation in 1941. Relying on similar forms of testimony to Massiah’s Tenants of Lenapehocking, Black Lions — Roman Wolves is sonically-driven, and the contributions of composer Aschalew Fetene are a vital narrative vehicle.
Gerima’s filmic epic emphasizes the importance of singing, poetry, and battle cries to inspire and boost the morale of fighters; unite and foster the rebellious spirit of the population; provide substance when food was lacking; and offer courage, consolation, and the will to continue. Singers, balladeers, troubadours, shepherds, and even birds take part in this chorus of passing information, warnings, and surveillance of the enemy. While it comes more than halfway through the overall work, Part Four illuminates the importance of voice and sound to Black Lions — Roman Wolves overall as a cinematic recitation, constantly accompanied by a bellowing drum beat which keeps the time of the documentary.
Historical telling is presented as a negotiation of past, present, and future. As one of the talking head historians notes, recrafting Ethiopian national history is not merely a matter of making political declarations but laying the foundations for active use by future generations. While the extensive, self-reflexive style of Gerima’s series fundamentally differs from the straightforward historical drama of Jacir’s Palestine 36, and even the use of archival materials is qualitatively distinct, both function as counternarratives. Respectively, they delegitimize the manufactured histories of fascism and Zionism by exposing corollary colonial tactics of sowing dissent and coercion, allied with inventing alibis for land theft, ethnic cleansing, and civilizational domination. At BlackStar, the connections between the films were animated by the movements of festival-goers, expressed in post-screening conversations which added another layer of vocal exchange.
* * *
Between yearly editions, film festivals serve as a litmus test of the global social fabric and its organizing political economies. As audiences were told during several introductions, too many filmmakers (and other kinds of unnamed attendees) were absent because of the current draconian measures around travel to the US—in other words, precisely the historically entrenched mechanisms of imperial power challenged by many of the films. While they may have shifted, the colonial cartographies of the 16th century were the land thefts of the 20th century and are the violent borders of today.
At the everyday level and through its larger objectives, BlackStar reintroduces intertwined histories not as isolated oppositional responses to a standard but stanzas in a long-spanning song of sorrow and rebellion. Lingering after screenings, convening in the pockets between venues, and bumping into people in surprising but predictable encounters on the street produced a collective witnessing amongst descents of the global majority. While not unusual for a festival to be intergenerational, there is a particular significance for that confluence of cinematic lineages that have been constantly interrupted and fragmented, much like the collective life of the people who make them.
From past to present, from screen to spectator, the festival offered a venue for reconnection. The songs of BlackStar speak to enacting an old call for a new future. Third Cinema was notable for its practice of “active spectatorship,” when, for example, a film would be shown to workers as a pretext for them to work through a shared labor issue. While it may not match up to that model of cultural militancy, the collective chants at the festival signaled a political consciousness that has taken hold with accumulative force. BlackStar has a place in the arsenal of provisional precursors and organizing tools towards building the collective power needed to make material what is yet only imagined.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment, or log in if you’re already a paid subscriber.