Six Films on Art and Resistance at BlackStar Film Festival
The BlackStar Film Festival marked its 15th anniversary in Philadelphia from August 6 to 9 with a lineup of 91 films centered on its theme of “a cinema for liberation.” Among highlighted works were Haile Gerima’s five-part documentary “Black Lions, Roman Wolves” on Ethiopia’s resistance to Italy’s 1935 invasion, Suneil Sanzgiri’s “An Impossible Address” on Indian and African freedom struggles against Portuguese colonialism, and Harlan Banks’s “I Wonder Shall I Fly,” which combines Black diasporic footage with 1940s recordings of interviews with formerly enslaved people. The festival also featured “A Life in Art: Through the Eye of Dr. Leslie King Hammond (2026),” directed by Ben Baker-Lee and Rassaan Hammond, profiling art historian and critic Dr. Leslie King Hammond and her mentorship of artists including Ernest Shaw, Jeffrey Kent, and Amy Sherald. The film includes a scene of Hammond with Sherald as she works on her portrait of Michelle Obama for the National Gallery, emphasizing Hammond’s role in shaping how artists of color are seen and discussed.
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This story was covered in Digital Biennales and Restitution Wars Escalate