11th BlackStar Film Festival Weekend Highlights
There’s still time to see great films at this year’s festival
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The BlackStar Film Festival, showcasing visual work from the African diaspora and Indigenous communities, is back for its 11th year with screenings around the city and online. There are shorts, panel discussions, and even morning yoga. Some of this weekend’s feature highlights include:
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‘Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power’
Documentary, Montgomery Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus
Saturday, Aug. 6 at 10 a.m. (also virtual), 90 minutes
Documentary about the fight to vote in poor, rural, racist Lowndes County, Alabama, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lowndes had a population that was 80% Black yet had no Black voters.
‘Wisdom Gone Wild’
Documentary, Zellerbach Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus
Saturday, Aug. 6, at 3 p.m. (virtual at 4 p.m.), 84 minutes
Documentary from director Rea Tajiri that takes a different look at caregiving and dementia as it examines 15 years in the life of Tajiri’s elderly mother. Rose Noda Tajiri has her family’s Japanese American experience all in her head and it comes out in fits and spurts with little relation to order or time – wisdom gone wild.
‘Hazing’
Documentary, Zellerbach Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus
Saturday, Aug. 6, at 8:30 p.m. (virtual at 8 p.m.), 104 minutes
Through talks with survivors and family members of the deceased, documentarian Byron Hunt explores the ritual of underground hazing and its cultural touchstones of groupthink, control, power, toxic masculinity, and race and gender. It also asks why some standby while their friends are being tortured.
‘Tug of War’
Zellerbach Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus
Sunday, Aug. 7, at 11 a.m. (virtual at noon), 90 minutes
There have been other love stories set during regime changes, but not one set during the end of British rule in Zanzibar. Here, an Indian Zanzibari young woman looks to a freedom-fighting revolutionary to help her escape from an arranged marriage.
‘Mars One’
Zellerbach Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus
Sunday, Aug. 7, at 8:30 a.m. (virtual at 8 p.m.), 115 minutes, in Portuguese
A Brazilian drama that will resonate with many. The Martins are an optimistic lower-middle-class family whose worldview is challenged when a right-wing extremist is elected president.
For more details and tickets, go to blackstarfest.org/festival/.