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Picks for this year’s BlackStar Film Festival
The BSR Weekly Arts and Culture Roundup, August 2026
Kyle V. Hiller
The 15th annual BlackStar Film Festival is here, running an assortment of feature films, documentaries, short films, panels, workshops, and more in celebration of visionary Black, brown, and Indigenous film and media artists. The festival will take place August 6-9, with screenings at Suzanne Roberts Theatre, the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, and the Wilma, essentially taking over Broad Street. This week’s roundup features my picks for the festival, but be sure to check out the full lineup for yourself! Many of the films are streaming virtually, too, so if you can’t make it to the screenings, you can still catch some great movies from the comfort of your own home (or a friend’s home, because movies can be a social thing).
Chrononaut Shorts
Thursday, August 6, 1pm
Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 South Broad Street
I love a good time travel (or loop, manipulation, or reflection) movie, and this series has three short films with unique takes. The Store takes place in a forgotten corner of the city where an unassuming bodega serves as a gateway to ancestral wisdom. “Patrons searching for everyday items receive something far greater—TEACHA brand products, unlocking visions of a world where Black people thrive beyond limitation. Blending afrosurrealism with the aesthetics of ’70s and ’80s urban culture and African and Caribbean spirituality, the Hood Botanica transforms the bodega into a portal of self-discovery. The silent store clerk, adorned with cowrie AirPods, serves as the quiet guide to transformation.” Then, Watch Out For the Ghosts serves as a personal meditation on loss, family, home and reclamation through the artistic process of Adebunmi Gbadebo, creating works out of organic materials from the South Carolina plantation cemeteries where her formerly enslaved ancestors and their descendants are buried. Finally, An Impossible Address operates as both an archaeological and narrative excavation, reconnecting the power of Afro-Asian solidarities through the history of anti-colonial movements.
Intradependence Shorts
Thursday, August 6, 2:30pm
Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, 300 South Broad Street
This series of shorts focuses on collective action. The Seeds We Carry documents “intimate portraits of community farm stewards in Southwest Philadelphia. Through the rhythms of planting, cooking, and sharing food, the protagonists reveal how everyday acts of care and resistance nurture belonging, foster cross-cultural kinship and preserve a sense of home amid the pressures of gentrification and displacement.” Philly Rumba tells the story about a group of African American men in Philadelphia who gravitated toward Cuban rumba as an expression of their African roots during the Civil Rights and Pan African Eras. Fifty years later, they continue to play rumba together, proving that music can create community and solidarity in difficult times—certainly a heartwarming thing to see. Authors of the Estate explores how, in Britain, only one in ten authors are working class and the movement happening to bridge that gap.
Aquarius shorts
Thursday, August 6, 4:30pm
The Wilma Theater, 265 South Broad Street
More short films! Noticing a theme here yet? It’s accidental and I think I’m just in the mood for some short films. Anyway, this series brings “placemaking through water,” it starts off with Ixquic, a short film about a Indigenous Guatemalan teenager of the same name who discovers that her mother’s stories like the ones about ancestral Mayan beings may be real when a river turns to blood after a hydroelectric company threatens their community. Same Water is a lyrical nonfiction film that “that weaves memory with archive to examine Black leisure, freedom and exclusion at Silver Springs State Park in Ocala, Florida.” Charip: Lightning in the River documents a group’s efforts to stave off a gold rush that threatens the Amazon, and Communion shows how a group of lesbian friends over 50 travel together and celebrate friendship and their desire for freedom.
Black Zombie
Friday, August 7, 7:30pm
Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 South Broad Street
A journey through cinema and history reveals how zombies evolved from Haitian spiritual traditions into Hollywood horror, exploring their deeper cultural significance as powerful symbols of resilience. I’m always down for a little history on film and TV ideas and their true origins before they turned into tropes.
Becoming Human
Saturday, August 8, 11am
Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 South Broad Street
An abandoned cinema’s former spirit guardian wanders through rapidly transformed landscapes to reach her rebirth. Shocked by the world’s brutality, she must decide whether to become human again or remain a homeless ghost. I think a film about choosing what world you want to exist in—and ultimately not exist in—feels deeply resonant.
Bouchra
Saturday, August 8, 6pm
Wilma Theater, 265 South Broad Street
“Wrestling with writer’s block for her first film, Bouchra, a queer Moroccan jackal living in New York City, starts having difficult yet overdue phone calls with her mother in Casablanca that begin influencing the project. Balancing the precarity of working as an artist in New York, the rift in her identity between her two homes, and an array of friendships and romantic interests, Bouchra’s emotional reckoning with her mother and herself becomes her path to expression.” I’m curious about the art style here that’s wrapped around the classic “struggling with writing” storyline.
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