What does cinema for liberation really mean? At the 2025 BlackStar Film Festival (BSFF), which ran through August 3 in Philadelphia, that tagline resounds. So often, similar words lose meaning as a DEI-coded balm to indicate challenging the status quo; more closely, the term reveals that it’s not enough to be released from captivity but also given the tools to navigate and enjoy that freedom. BSFF is an arsenal of experiences that navigate self-determination within and beyond the current structures we are entangled in, an apt practice at the advent of Black August. Even in the name, the festival conjures Marcus Garvey’s 1919-founded Black-owned shipping company, fostering exchange and economic sovereignty.
The programming operated at a steady pace of screenings, talkbacks, rest and recoup sessions unless a film featured particularly challenging subject matter. While there was encouragement to take care, the mental labor of taking in so many documentary-style films back to back was difficult, with titles becoming more challenging to digest, so a mix of virtual and in-person screenings and socializing was key. Notably, the in-person experience was sublime: we sat as one faction of amity and erudition, unified by the hmmm’s, ahhh’s, ohhh’s and laughter aimed at the screen. Audiences were especially vocal, buzzing with questions during the talkbacks. Just as multiple modes of receiving films were honored, so were the multiple storytelling techniques. “When white people tell a story, it’s once upon a time, and when Black people tell their stories, it’s like you can’t believe this shit…,” filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson pointed out.
Many of the festival’s films dealt with mythocracy in positive, ambivalent and negative ways. Christine Turner’s highly anticipated Sun Ra: Do the Impossible (2025), which premiered at Tribeca, focused more on the musical milieu of Sun Ra rather than on the philosophical entity, poet, bandleader, sartorialist and asexual persona donning sequins head to toe. We get a glimpse of this complexity, yet as a focal point, it would be far more interesting. Despite the film’s shortcomings, it names Ra as the Godfather of Afrofuturism, and it dawned on me that his considering himself a Saturn-born archangel king speaks to the thin line between lunacy and genius that we must accept. While it is a myth that all descendants of enslaved Africans are royalty, that myth is crucial to expanding our possibilities and increasing self-assurance.
We Were the Scenery (2025), on the other hand, is ostensibly about the flaws inherent in mythmaking, but then transcends those limitations with a detailed account of Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che’s roles as extras in Apocalypse Now, a seminal film for the American study of the Vietnam War. Forced to act in the background of the film after fleeing to the Philippines from Vietnam, they talk about how action shots were achieved, removing the veil from our eyes, and point out when they and their friends are on-screen. This retelling, directed by Christophe Radcliff, positions them as protagonists who launch forward from the scenery of their kitchen, living room and B-roll of Vietnam. The film, told partially from the perspective of the couple’s daughter, poet Cathy Linh Che, tells parts of a story often missing.
And yet it’s sometimes the stories that we tell that create harmful environments for self-expression. Hao Zhou’s award-nominated Correct Me If I’m Wrong (2025) is about a Chinese family fractured by state interference by way of the two-child rule. The filmmaker’s mother, forced to get an abortion under the policy, fears that the spirit of her baby girl inflicts her son and causes his queerness. We see rituals of drinking a scorpion tincture, being hit repeatedly (especially in the buttocks region, for that is the “blockage area”), cupping, being fed corn, offering yen to a paper demon doll and countless consultations with shamans and body workers, all in an attempt to curb Hao’s homosexual proclivities. The film takes the audience through a rollercoaster of emotions—we laugh at the ridiculousness of it and feel profound sadness that family can betray a central part of who you are simply because belief is such a powerful force.
But how do we come by these beliefs? The surprisingly delightful film Piñata Prayers (2025) interrogates childhood play and how it instructs societal norms. We come to learn through Daniel Larios’ film that the seven-pointed star form of traditional piñatas represents the seven deadly sins, and blindfolding represents faith—a tradition taught by Spanish colonizers to instruct Indigenous peoples in the Christian faith. Larios, a former Seventh Day Adventist, explores this “playful” pastime and his faith in a world rife with Salvadoran gangs and government killings. The film includes home videos, a third-generation piñataera talking about their practice, interpretive dance and eventually, footage of the filmmaker breaking a piñata of himself to a soundtrack of punk music, metaphorically breaking free from the blind path of colonial thought.
Is film reflective of what society is or what it can be? And is it a way to break free or a tool of enclosure? Several BlackStar screenings tackled film as a tool of representation and propaganda. Unraveling and reclaiming cinematic history amidst the violence of silent films takes place in the restored feature-length film that was the first major representation of Black American Sign Language, Compensation (1999). Director Zeinabu irene Davis spoke about how Deaf actors were often trained by hearing ones, like Charlie Chaplin, who owes his slapstick comedy style to Deaf actor Granville Redman. That echoes in the time-skipping on-screen narrative following two couples (in which one person is hearing and the other Deaf) in the early 1900s and in the 1990s; the viewer oscillates between being the eyes and being the ears through action and imagery, much like the couple’s relationship. The standout scene sees Malindy (the Black Deaf character from 1910) meeting Arthur (the Black hearing character recently migrated from Mississippi to Chicago) on the beach. Arthur speaks to Malindy, and she covers her ears while shaking her head to indicate she can’t hear. She moves chalk across a handheld board, but Arthur says that he can’t read—shining a light on the era’s stark divide between new Southern migrants and Black Northerners.
In the same vein, Candace Williamson’s Boil That Cabbage Down (2025) takes its name from a song with ties to the racist minstrelsy that plagued early film but also predated it. Williamson opted not to replicate that harmful imagery but instead begins with the painting The Old Plantation, attributed to John Rose ca. 1785-1790, that hangs on her wall. The vibrant color and perceived movement inspire the choreography of reenactors who help reveal the origins of the banjo, which the filmmaker is learning to play. As Boil That Cabbage Down progresses, we learn that the banjo was created by enslaved Black people and was once the most popular instrument in America among Black people, but its origins have been overshadowed by the uglier elements of its history. The namesake song is often the first that new banjo players learn. How does this reclamation relate to liberation? It reveals that joy is a necessary ingredient, as is carrying the past into the future.
Another BSFF selection rectifying the violence of cinema was Adam Piron’s overly abstracted technical Black Glass, which shone better in a talkback session and the “Neither Saints Nor Sinners” panel on The Daily Jawn stage chat a few days later. Afterward, the intentions behind Piron’s aesthetic and sonic choices were clearly an echo of Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion (1878), which also documented the fate of the Modoc people. In context, the static sound and extreme flashing lights of the film made sense by creating a sense of motion in Muybridge’s work and containing the extreme violence of the archive. Without that context, Black Glass was, frankly, off-putting, which may have been the point.
A film that was also abstract but in a more successful way was Bex Oluwatoyin Thompson’s Another Other (2025). In it, clear themes emerged: solidarity is crucial to liberation, as is not aspiring to whiteness. This nine-minute experimental film packs a powerful punch, dissecting the thin line between campaigning and interrogation through a clip of Claudine Gay, the first Black president and second woman president of Harvard University, testifying in front of Congress. When asked about the university’s policies toward anti-Semitism and specific disciplinary action, Gay circled the question, contradicted herself and nearly admitted to allowing anti-Semitic rhetoric on campus. As she answers, Wesley Snipes in Rising Sun appears on screen with his interrogators.
“Both subjects [Gay and Snipes’ character] reveal themselves as collaborators with racist and antiblack systems—even as those systems attempt to chew them up and spit them out,” says Oluwatoyin Thompson. Language unlocks how “neoliberalism is uncaring by design,” according to The Care Manifesto. No matter if the spectator is sympathetic to Gay’s position, the system reveals itself. Thompson strips down the audio to a buzzing projector and slides, emulating her editing practice. “I mimicked the visuals with my encounter,” she explains. While watching the film, the captions seem to follow the audio, then a slippage of ironic commentary named the unsaid. The selection aptly shows why micro-documentaries are the new order of American cinema. Yes, it was short, but it opens up such rich dialogue that could be several books.
Now, in the face of bureaucracy, violence and oppression, how do we create the world that we want to see using a fraught medium? Lydia Cornett’s Tessitura (2025) rounds out the festival experience while answering that question. It doesn’t paint a utopia but acknowledges the complex experiences of trans (enby, trans masc and trans femme) singers in opera—a genre predicated on vocal athleticism and control yet seemingly a paradox of liberation. Within vocal ranges, there are gender roles or character types that singers are forced to play: “trouser roles” are reserved for cis women, who are allowed to play men or be androgynous. In vignettes of character studies, we meet Breanna Sinclairé, Katherine Goforth, Lucas Bouk and Naomi André. Some retrain their new voices after hormone therapy, but Sinclairé has always had a voice at a higher register despite their birth assignment. In one gripping scene, we see her visiting an ENT specialist’s office, where a camera probe shows her vocal cords rubbing to make a sensational soprano sound. The warmth of this moment is palpable; it is with tension that beauty emerges.
