Black Cinema Collective offers an International Series of Community Curated films for the
2025 Seattle Black Film Festival (SBFF)
at LANGSTON April 24th to 27th
Dilli Dark film still, courtesy of Dibakar Roy
Special Screening + Filmmaker Discussion
co-presented by Black Cinema Collective + LANGSTON
Saturday April 26th, 2025, 7:00pm
Dilli Dark, 2023
⭐️ Seattle Premiere
Director/Writer. Dibakar Das Roy, Prod. Udayan Das Roy
Cast: Samuel Abiola Robinson, Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, Shantanu Anam
Runtime: 100 mins | Languages: English, Hindi, Yoruba, Pidgin, Bengali, Gujarati with English subtitles | Country: India
There will be a post conversation and audience Q&A with director Dibakar Das Roy and BCC founder Berette S Macaulay, moderated by Savita Krishnamoorthy
Program curated by Berette S Macaulay
FILM SYNOPSES + TRAILER
Film Synopsis:
Michael Okeke, a Nigerian living in New Delhi wants to get his MBA and settle in India. But his part-time job as a drug dealer will jeopardize his plans, not to mention the open racism he is facing.
ABOUT Director
Directors Note
Being a dark-skinned Bengali boy from east India growing up in a boarding school in north India, I faced quite a bit of bullying from the average fair-skinned student, but it was usually brushed under the carpet as friendly banter. So much so that I realised that the only way to tackle this was to develop the thick skin to go with the extra melanin. It has stood me in good stead because the ‘banter’ does not end in India with boarding school.
The seeds of the idea of ‘Dilli Dark’ came to me over the years as I saw many Africans in New Delhi being treated in the same way I was bullied in boarding school, and the character of Michael Okeke became a metaphor for every person who is made to feel like an outsider in Indian society today.
Casual discrimination is all around us in India. From film stars hawking fairness creams to matrimonial ads asking for fair-skinned brides and grooms, the colour of skin is just one of the many ways in which prejudice is expressed in everyday Indian society, apart from religion, caste, ethnicity, sex, class, diet and others.This normalisation of discrimination is what the film is about – an attempt to hold up a distorted fun-house mirror to a society that perhaps does not understand how deep it’s biases run or where they even arise from.
Dibakar Das Roy left a career in advertising in the USA to come back home to learn filmmaking on the job; writing, producing and directing under his banner www.braincell.in ‘Dilli Dark’ is his first feature film. He spends his time between Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata.
ABOUT MODERATOR
Savita Krishnmoorthy is an art historian, writer, organizer, and educator from India, based in Redmond, WA. She is a founding member and co-organizer of Black Cinema Collective. Her writing publications include The Times of India, Feminist Media Histories (Univ. of California Press), Courageous Creativity, and Black Embodiment Studio Journal. Savita is a cultural critic and reviewer for the International Examiner, Seattle, where she shares her insights on literary and artistic offerings in the Pacific Northwest.
ABOUT PROGRAM CURATOR
Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary artist and writer with creative and cultural practices in photography, mixed media, curating, and art organizing. She is the founder of Black Cinema Collective (BCC) which is a project of the collaborative arts incubator, i•ma•gine | e•volve. She is currently serving as Guest Curator for the Behnke Foundation 2025 Neddy Award Exhibition and supporting engagements.
PRESENTING PARTNERS + FILM SUPPORT
LOCATION
LANGSTON Center for Performing Arts Grand Hall Theatre
Located on the first floor
104 17th Avenue South
Seattle, WA, 98144