End of Year Letter 2024
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.
— Toni Morrison
Dear BCC Community,
We are nearing the end of another year, and it seems like life has hit a rewind button! The chaos, heartache, and tumult of the past year, both in our country and around the world, continue to weigh heavily on our present. While we share in the exhaustion and sharp anxiety of the times, we also hold clarity and focus as we move forward. It is also precisely in these difficult times that we *must* hold on to the activating power of the arts. It is the arts that provide solace and sacred space to be in community with each other, facilitating the ways we connect and work together through the challenges ahead. In creating and maintaining mutual space of refuge and resistance, it is imperative that our work include energizing modes of fortitude, culture making, and joy - big or small.
To make a film means to take a position, and when I take a position, I am educating people. The audience has a need to know that there’s a war going on… I make films so that people — no matter what race or color they are — can understand them.
— Sarah Maldoror
In the 5+ years of BCC’s existence, we have always closed out each year reflecting on our work, and expressing gratitude for those who have collaborated with us. This has been a quieter year of programming than previous years, as we spent much time tending to our filmmaker microgrant and artist support programs, while thinking deeply about how our organization will continue to function in the future. A significant portion of our cultural, political, and social alignments in 2024 have been expressed primarily through the films we’ve shared via our newsletters and social platforms.
An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.
— Nina Simone
We unequivocally support the international protest and legal efforts for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid in Palestine, and the continued aid and drives towards self-determination in the Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Puerto Rico, Lebanon, Hawai’i, Taiwan, and for the liberation of oppressive regimes, including here in the United States. While we can only claim public-facing efforts of being a film programming organization, we recognize that each one of us has a specific role in contributing to the collective whole which reinforces our mission:
“With a Black global lens, we consider intersectional histories and topical stories by supporting films from local and global artists, activists, documentarians, and organizers.”
As such we will continue to share the critical storytelling actions of filmmakers across the Black Atlas, in the contemporary and from the archives, because our fight must be informed by those who came before us; it must be culturally interdisciplinary and global as the most effective revolutionary way that we forge ahead.
In the spirit of showcasing films that affirm and intersect with revolutionary voices, we offered an ongoing series of curated Black films on BCC’s Instagram. With many platforms putting up more paywalls to view films, Em Chan (BCC Communications Assistant) has been researching online platforms and archives that offer films for free or reduced rental or subscription fees. Films from AfroDescendants worldwide are still difficult to access; our Instagram highlights an attempt to increase this access, and acknowledge other platforms that are doing the same.
The visual archive plays a crucial role in revealing the interconnected reach of global oppressions and documenting historical acts of resistance. Some of the filmmakers who teach us how to actively witness include Sudanese filmmaker Amjad Abu Alala’s You Will Die at Twenty (2019), Palestinian filmmakers Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman’s Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990), and Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s movie about Congolese leader Patrice Emery Lumumba (2000).
We integrated this curation of film highlights with our annual Black Sonic Evolutions (BSE) program, which recognizes Black Music Month in June. Our selected list of films broadened collective knowledge of how Afrodiasporic cultures have influenced revolutionary movements around the world through music.
Spiritually speaking, every human being has a destiny and a duty to perform....The human spirit is stronger than any government or institution.
— Fela Kuti
In 2024, BCC also partnered with local and national organizations aligning with our mission to amplify Black films, artists, and filmmakers, offering diverse programs and co-presentations.
Year in Review
Our 2024 Programs + Partner Presentations
BCC Programs:
BCC Filmmaker Microgrant
In April 2024, Black Cinema Collective launched its second Black Filmmaker Microgrant. The goal was to help Black filmmakers + artists with the final push to complete their projects and see their visions+ filmmaking dreams come to fruition.
Grant Awardees were announced on October 8th, 2024. After careful consideration and deliberation by our nationally renowned jury of artists + filmmakers, Ania Freer, Chari Glogovac-Smith, and Zainab Jah, the grant was awarded to two talented voices in storytelling.
Dui Jarrod and Fiz Olajide received $7,500 each, as well as an opportunity for bi-coastal public film screenings with promotional support provided by the New York African Film Festival and Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, and a 6-month subscription to MUBI’s expansive selection of indie films.
The panel also selected four Honorable Mentions in recognition of their inspiring cinematic vision – Carla Brown, Jamal Ademola, Regina Hoyles, and Scott Patterson.
Congratulations again to our awardees!!! We look forward to the incredible collaborations, stories, and films that will emerge from this microgrant program. Jarrod and Olajide’s films will be screened in Spring 2025, and we’ll keep you posted as we approach those program dates.
Partner Presentations:
Making Men at NYAFF
We were honored to co-present Making Men for the 2024 New York African Film Festival at Francesca Beale Theater in Lincoln Center in May.
Promotional graphic for the Making Men program, featuring a still from the film.
Making Men delves into the mores of masculinity as four individuals navigate societal expectations on their path to manhood, marking their journeys with uncertainties nearly impossible to define. Shot in the breathtaking landscape of Harare, Zimbabwe, with interiors filmed in Brussels, Belgium, Making Men features strong and rhythmical choreography by Harold George, with captivating cinematography by Antoine Panier, intensifying our emotional responses to the powerful movement of the dancers.
The New York African Film Festival premiere was followed by a live dance demonstration and a post-conversation with Dance Artist + Choreographer Harold George (Belgium/Sierra Leone) with program organizer, Berette S Macaulay.
Simon Benjamin in Film at Union + Sunday Dinner at Wa Na Wari
BCC was proud to be a sponsoring partner for the Jacob Lawrence Gallery Legacy Artist in Residence, Simon Benjamin along with Wa Na Wari, Photographic Center NW, Capitol Hill Arts District, and The Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
On his first visit to Seattle in April 2024, the Jamaican-born artist Simon Benjamin explored the colonial legacies that impact Afro-diasporic peoples and traditions through the lens of the Caribbean, while discovering new cultural intersections in the Pacific Northwest.
SUNDAY DINNER at WA NA WARI - On April 7th, 2024, we screened five short films by Simon Benjamin at Wa Na Wari, that supported the artist’s exhibition, A BOLT FROM THE BLUE at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington, organized by Guest Curator, Berette S Macaulay.
Throughout the African diaspora, Sunday is a day to gather, give thanks, and share a special mid-late afternoon gathering around slow-cooked food after worship at church. For the Sunday Dinner engagement, artists, organizers, students, and scholars gathered with Benjamin at Wa Na Wari, Seattle for a select screening of five of his short films while enjoying conversation and food from Taste of the Caribbean.
Later, attendees witnessed the launch of the monumental-scale screening of three of Benjamin's films, silently projected every night from April 7th – May 15th on the Woodworth Apartment Building at 10th Street and Union Avenue, presented in partnership with Photographic Center NW, Capitol Hill Arts District, Seaview Properties, and Luminaris.
The films screened and enjoyed in community were:
Two Score Full Moon (2019)
The Memory Held Within Water (2022)
On Childhood (2019)
Errantry (2021)
Autodoor (2020)
Forum IV (2016)
Promotional program graphic for The Best Tool for Outlaws is and Always Will Be the Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre Bekolo, featuring a portrait photo of Bekolo.
The Best Tool for Outlaws is and Always Will Be the Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre Bekolo
In May 2024, BCC partnered with Sankofa Film Society and The Beacon to present Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s stirring futurist cinema that creates paradoxes and brand new philosophical inquiries by subverting expectations of African cinema. Blurring external pre-conceptions and internal understandings of what African cinema is or should be, Bekolo’s aesthetic mode is one that “merrily tosses it all together.” The Beacon hosted Jean-Pierre Bekolo in person for three Q&As!
Films:
Quartier Mozart (1992)
Aristotle’s Plot (1996)
Les Saignantes (2005)
For Our Children
In May, we partnered with Langston and Sankofa Film Society to screen Debora Sousa Silva’s, For Our Children, a trenchant documentary following two mothers who come together and build a growing, national network of mothers whose African American children have been killed or attacked in acts of police violence. The film is a timely exposé of a group of women hopeful in their resistance as they join hands to help the next generation of Black children survive in America.
Promotional program graphic for the For Our Children screening, featuring a poster for the film.
The screening was followed by a reception and community talk with Mothers for Police Accountability.
Shout Outs
As always, we are thankful for all our partnerships and supporters with whom we were able to offer rich programming for our shared communities. It was our privilege and an honor to work with each of you.
Partners + Supporters + Artists + Advisors
Harold George, Antoine Panier, Simon Benjamin, Christopher Day, Jill Busby, Derek Edamura, and Camille Hermida-Fuentes at Northwest Film Forum, Elisheba Johnson and Inye Wokoma at Wa Na Wari, Mahen Bonetti, Tisa Chigaga, Zamzam Dirieh Ali, and Devin Powell at New York African Film Festival, Shayna Nowicki at Beacon Cinema, Kristyn Cheek at MUBI, Kathy Hsieh at City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, Carmen Hom at the International Examiner, Susan Harewood, and Lauren Berliner, BCC Advisory Circle
Your support means the world to us.
Thank You!!
From BCC to you and your loved ones, we wish you an abundance of peace, rest, warmth, and some fun as we bid adieu to 2024!
*Warm Love & Light*
BCC Team
Berette, Chile, Em, Savita
