Join us Thursday, April 16th – Saturday, April 18th for Reel Stories: A CFAC Film Festival. Enjoy a weekend of storytelling, screenings, panel discussions, and more!
Schedule of Events
Thursday, April 16th: Join us Thursday, April 16, at 6:00 PM in the Blackbox Theatre for our opening reception and screening of Space to Breathe, directed by Juicebox P. Burton. Space to Breathe is an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary, framed with a future where there are no prisons or police. The year is 2070, and Sojourner is a young, genderqueer filmmaker who sets out to understand how abolition came to be, through history’s archives on the movements of the early 21st century. After the film join us for a fireside chat with Professor Isiah Lavender III, Ph.D., and leading actor, Nish Newton.
Friday, April 17th: Starting at 5:00 PM, enjoy an evening of short dramas, international, and experimental films:
Teens with a Movie Camera
Chickadee Overcomes Gravity
Teens with a Movie Camera
Stuck on the ground but dreaming of the stars, an audacious chicken sets out to go where no chicken has gone before. Created in collaboration with young artists using everyday tools, smartphones, and imagination, this two-minute epic celebrates the power of persistence. Bok bok!
OUR PLACE IN SPACE
Teens with a Movie Camera
Tired of being weighed down by Earth’s gravity, a small but ambitious team of teens works together to accomplish the seemingly impossible in search of another world. Adapting a simple tent into a spaceship powered by imagination and orange juice, they take their own trip to the moon and befriend extraterrestrial neighbors.
Another Other
Dir. Bex Oluwatoyin Thompson
A Black police officer and university president are interrogated by multiple white state officials after their failures to sufficiently comply with their respective institutions’ plans. An experiment in image, sound and subtitle, Another Other identifies these figures as collaborators with racist systems, even as those systems betray them.
Della Can Fly!
Dir. jasmine lynea Della Can Fly! is a Black folktale set in the early 2000s. In hopes of reuniting with his long-lost sister, an eccentric old man is in desperate need to prove to his family that she flew away. With the help of his grieving 10-year-old great-niece, they rectify the family myth, proving it to be true.
Lana
Dir. Laetitia Angba + Julie R. Lissouba
In the turmoil of adolescence, Lana does not lead a life completely like the others. As a daily fight goes on in silence, Lana learns that her father, Benjemin, must leave Canada permanently. She must then muster her courage to confront her father before he leaves.
Nada Fuera de la Isla: Puentes (Nothing Out of the Island: Bridges) Dir. Dalissa Montes de Oca
Fragmented Memories and visions find a home in light and shadows, bridging the gap between past, the present, and loss of a mother.
Natimorto
Dir. Ibrahem Hasan + Leandro HBL
In Bahia, Brazil, Benicio is born into silence, loss and ancestral grief. Haunted by inherited pain, he turns inward, recording messages to his unborn self. Through remembrance and release, he begins to break the cycle. By embracing his darkness with acceptance, he confronts his past, rewrites his story and creates space for healing.
nobody’s word
Dir. camara taylor
Based on a voicenote received 500 years after the “start of slavery,” nobody’s word seeks to complicate notions of ancestor, inheritance and implication across time and space. Within the film, camara taylor digitizes and disintegrates the family archive in order to reframe accounts, destabilize claims, and inhabit the spaces between fact and fiction.
Objectionable Fruit
Dir. Gabby Follett
An experimental documentary in collaboration with artist Hogan Seidel that explores the enigmatic world of the Ginkgo tree, a living fossil that has silently witnessed the unfolding of Earth’s deep time. Ginkgo trees have endured since the days of the prehistoric, surviving through myriad epochs of pollution, aggressive urban planning, and escalating climate disasters. Known scientifically as Ginkgo biloba, this species possesses a fascinating biological characteristic: the ability to switch sexes, blurring the lines traditionally used to define male and female in plant reproduction. This unique adaptability serves as a powerful metaphor in the pieces, echoing the complexities and fluidities of gender identity as experienced and interpreted by the film’s creator.
Same Water
Martine Granby
Archival materials and research revive the story of Florida’s Paradise Park, a waterpark that served as a leisure destination for Black middle-class families during the Jim Crow era.
SEEDS
Brittany Shyne
Seeds is a portrait of centennial farmers in the American South. Using lyrical black-and-white imagery, this meditative film examines the decline of generational Black farmers and the significance of owning land.
St. Andrews
Dir. Erin Ramirez
Coming to terms with her family’s racial prejudice, a Chinese-Jamaican teenager is pushed to carry out a subtle act of defiance—one which may have permanent consequences.
Youlogy/No Ghosts
Dir. Darryl Daley Youlogy/No Ghosts explores cyclical motifs of arrival and departure through the artist’s grandmother’s migration to the United Kingdom and her posthumous return to Jamaica, creating a transcendental frame where memory and time merge. In this speculative space, the film navigates beyond the confines of mortality, reimagining a future where inherited stories resist linearity.
Saturday, April 18th, starting at 11:00 AM
TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing
Louis Massiah + Monica Henriquez TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing is a biography of the influential writer Toni Cade Bambara, whose literary works and film collaborations were a catalyzing force in the 20th century cultural and political movements. The documentary is made up of stories shared by friends and colleagues including Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney and Haile Gerima.
The Bombing of Osage Avenue, 1987
Louis Massiah
This film documents the communal response to the 1985 bombing of the MOVE organization’s house in West Philadelphia, killing 11 and destroying 65 houses in the neighborhood.
