A prolific storyteller, transformative educator, and devoted political activist, Toni Cade Bambara dedicated her life’s work to countering hegemonic institutional power structures. Through artistic mentorship and collaboration, literary education, and social justice work, the Black feminist writer of revolutionary novels such as The Salt Eaters (1980) and Those Bones Are Not My Child (2000) never wavered from her commitment to uplifting those subjected to injustices. “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible,” Bambara famously said in a 1982 interview.
Decades after her untimely death at the age of 56, these words have continued to inspire generations of artists and activists. Among them are the filmmakers behind TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025), a feature-length documentary kicking off Philadelphia’s 14th annual BlackStar Film Festival next Thursday, July 31.
Directed by Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez, who both worked with Bambara on the documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1996), the film retraces the artist’s life and work through interviews with Bambara herself alongside close friends and colleagues, including Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, and Haile Gerima.
The film is just one of 92 productions comprising this year’s lineup at BlackStar, which celebrates independent cinema by Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers and media artists from around the world. Running through Sunday, August 3, the festival will also host a variety of programming, from panel discussions and virtual screenings to community events.
Bookending the festival on Sunday, August 3, Jenn Nkiru’s 52-minute experimental documentary The Great North (2024) spotlights the diverse communities and cultures that make up the northwest English city of Manchester, with a special focus on its Black, Asian, and Irish residents. A combination of archival footage and new video set to the music of the city’s underground arts scene, the film uses Manchester’s industrial history as a launchpad before moving through Black community spaces and zooming out to the rest of the world.
Throughout the four-day festival, BlackStar will also feature a variety of narrative films like Johanné Gómez Terrero’s feature-length Sugar Island (2024), which follows the story of an unwanted pregnancy that thrusts Dominican-Haitian teenager Makenya into the harsh realities of adulthood. Asaph Luccas’s short “LWC (Lazy White Cows)” (2025), another highlight, tells the story of Ster, a young Black student at risk of being “cancelled” after she refers to a White classmate in disparaging terms.
In partnership with the Writers Against the War on Gaza and the West Philadelphia nonprofit Making Worlds Bookstore, the festival will screen Mahmoud Ahmed’s timely 2024 documentary Gazan Tales (غزة التي تطل على البحر). The work, which wrapped production before Israel’s ongoing bombardment and siege of the region, follows the paths of four Palestinian men in the Gaza Strip and offers a comprehensive view of life shaped by constant adaptation to violence and oppression.
BlackStar’s programming will also showcase a diverse roster of experimental works. Among these productions is Cauleen Smith’s trilogy The Volcano Manifesto (2024), which brings together the films “My Caldera” (2022), “Mines to Caves” (2023), and “The Deep West Assembly” (2024) for a psychedelic meditation that personifies geological forms and natural events.
In addition to its robust roster of new works, the festival will offer a screening of Charles Burnett’s poignant portrait of Black life in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, Killer of Sheep (1978). The filmmaker is also featured in BlackStar’s in-person Spotlight Conversation event series alongside Kahlil Joseph, director of the fictional Afrofuturist drama BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS (2025).
More information on the programming for this year’s iteration of the BlackStar Film Festival can be found on its website.
Maori Karmael Holmes, Blackstar’s chief executive and artistic officer, emphasized the importance of cinema’s “restorative and liberatory power,” particularly in the present moment.
“Each festival has been very special, but this year’s lineup feels especially epic,” Holmes said in a press release. “I’m looking forward to communing with filmmakers and audiences, sharing a collective laugh or cry.”
