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Screening real stories and fostering community
cinéSPEAK presents the Under the Stars Film Festival
Stephen Silver
cinéSPEAK’s Under the Stars outdoor film series is one of those things that came out of the pandemic, but has endured in a way that certain other Covid-era stopgaps did not. “Basically, in 2020, when a lot of us were feeling angst and sadness from being isolated from one another, and a lot of venues—especially music and cinema venues were closed, we wanted to bring people together safely and outside,” Sarah Mueller, cinéSPEAK’s founder, told BSR. Another goal, she said, was to give a showing to independent films that had missed out on the film festival circuit when most festivals were canceled in 2020.
Feature presentations
The first Under the Stars festival took place in the summer of 2021 at Clark Park in West Philadelphia, and it’s become an annual event since. This year’s fest will run on four consecutive Fridays, from May 29 through June 19, and each program will begin with a “community celebration,” featuring live music at 7pm, with the film starting at 9pm—once the darkness fully sets in. Several nights on the program will feature short films along with the main features, some of which are Pennsylvania premieres.
Films will be shown on a 30-foot blowup screen in the Bowl at Clark Park. Advocacy and cultural organizations will also be on hand for each night of the festival.
On May 29, the main feature is Everybody to Kenmure Street, a documentary that won the Special Jury Award at Sundance back in January. Felipe Bustos Sierra directed the film about the resistance to an immigration detention center in Scotland. That will be preceded by the short Barriga Llena, Corazón Contento (Full Belly, Happy Heart). Mueller, who saw the film at Sundance, described Everybody to Kenmure Street as “the film that guided the rest of the program.”
“It’s an incredibly uplifting story about neighbors who come together to stop the UK’s equivalent of ICE from kidnapping one of their neighbors on the morning of an Eid,” she said. “It’s incredibly powerful, but it showcases how regular neighbors who care for one another can show up for each other when it matters most.”
The main feature on June 5 is Steal This Story, Please!, a documentary about the long career of Democracy Now! radio host Amy Goodman. Directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the film deals in part with the controversial 1999 moment in which Goodman enlisted Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, to deliver commentaries on her show.
Mueller said the film is timely, with free speech and journalists under attack, including those like Goodman who work in public media.
“Amy Goodman has been somebody who has been doing this work for decades,” Mueller said. “I think she’s been somebody to respect, who’s been at this for a long time, and so it’s exciting to present her story as an encouragement to all of us to fight for truth, and to fight for our publications to be free.”
The short that night is the world premiere of Lori Waselchuk’s Abolition Conversations: Episode 1, featuring interviews with Philadelphia-area activists.
On June 12, the festival will feature director Kani Lapuerta’s Niñxs, an “intimate coming-of-age documentary” set in Mexico that follows, as Mueller describes it, “an incredibly exciting story that follows a trans girl outside Mexico City, and her and her family’s story… as she’s navigating her gender story.”
“It’s not a film that’s trauma-centered,” Mueller added. “It’s actually really about a child living out their joy in who they are.”
And on June 19, the featured documentary is TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, director Louis Massiah’s portrait of the late writer and filmmaker. That will be preceded by the world premiere of the short film #FreeBlackMamas: Hear Her Voice. Bambara, for a time, taught at Scribe Film Center, which was founded by Massiah, the film’s director.
“Toni Cade Bambara is certainly somebody for us all to look up to, in the way she modeled her life, as an artist, as an organizer, the way she brought people into her home, to kind of raise up the next generation of writers and organizers,” Mueller said.
What, When, Where
cinéSPEAK’s Under the Stars Film Festival. May 29, June 5, June 12, and June 19, 2026. Clark Park, 4301 Chester Avenue, Philadelphia. All events are free. cinespeak.org.
Each film has a scheduled rain date on the following Saturday, but if the weekend is rained out, they plan to reschedule it later in the summer.
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