Wellness and Care at BlackStar 2022
During the presentations of works having severe subject matter (e.g., Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt's Aftershock, Byron Hurt's Hazing, and Jasmine Mara López's Silent Beauty), BlackStar wellness team members led grounding sessions to the crowd. These moments allow audiences to heal coming into and leaving the presentation. Audiences could leave the screening or go back and forth to a sensory-friendly room from the theater at their discretion. As a non-industry-driven film festival where distribution deals rarely happen and in an industry that primarily funds, greenlights, and curates Black stories that center on their trauma rather than joy, audiences mustn't be overwhelmed by triggering content. Though all stories that center on BIPOC communities are essential to tell and share with the world, BlackStar acknowledges the need to provide meaningful context and the right mindset for audiences affected by such issues within presentations of trauma-heavy films.
Along with its noteworthy morning yoga sessions, they want audiences to provide self-love and self-care and know that we have and uplift each other. During the fest, I attended all four 9 am yoga sessions at Drexel Square. Though I fell numerous times, no one judged me on my beginner yoga skills. We all performed silly exercises and body-bending stretches that the instructors prompted us to do and told us to listen to our bodies, not their instructions. I got to find solace in not doing too much physically during these spiritual routines, and it prepared me to have fun at the festival. Those experiences gave me self-confidence in making new relationships with filmmakers and industry professionals at BlackStar while reuniting with several industry participants I met at past festivals.
Please incorporate such practices for all the artistic/executive directors of art organizations/institutions and CEOs of production companies/studios reading this. While you do not necessarily have to have yoga sessions during the festival and working shifts, you should establish wellness resource staff/centers modeled after universities, spaces for self-meditation and include pre-recorded meditative videos for online content. Everyone wants to feel safe and have solid mental health during events that affect their careers. No one should go through any anxiety levels when working in an industry that can take a lot of toll on our bodies. The more resources within mental and emotional support that are available to share, there will be more unity, safety, and love we can all build to make the world less separated.
A still from The Fourfold. Courtesy of Alisi Telengut
Despite all of the ongoing harmful things that make society divided, they constantly remind us about why we have our aspirations. They also interrogate the communities' purpose to give back (not necessarily in financial support), provide mutual aid, and heal with each other, as shown in the short program Gather Me. Three of the six films (Barry the Beekeeper, The Fourfold, and Wiedle's) in Gather Me present the billing's synopsis "a commitment to care" differently. Ikram Ahmed's Barry the Beekeeper examines Jamaican-born Barry caring not just for the bees but also for his neighborhood to protect and reopen the now-closed Merseyside Caribbean Council Community Centre (the oldest Black community center in Europe) against gentrification. It is a portrait of love that exemplifies unity amidst the exchange of honey between Barry, the bees, and fellow attendees while creating a future for the better. With beautiful kinetic close-ups of the bees, Ahmed heeds an inclination of environment, climate, and humanity. This approbation establishes the importance of self-care in Alisi Telengut's The Fourfold.
In its stop-motion presentation of worship, animistic beliefs, and rituals within an Indigenous lens, Telengut moves the nature setups (e.g., mixed material and painted combos of volcanoes, the sky, and the sun) forward. It implies humans' ongoing evolution when they age and how our surroundings shape who we are. It's a melancholy, soothing tale that makes the viewer critique the liveliness of inanimate objects and their role in healing. The Fourfold is a robust and delightful outlook on growth. Finally, in Kevin Jerome Everson's 16mm silent Wiedle's, he presents how his protagonist George, a butcher, cares for his work and eventual service to his customers. Everson's hand-cranking close-ups of George's use of the meat tender evokes life's imperfectness. The parallels in its camera's image and working specifications and George's work ethic resemble the process of creativity and demonstrate a perception of beauty in seeing the making of both works. Like in his past 160+ films, such as Fe26, Everson intertwines work, pace, and the edit's manipulation that avoids spectacle and didacticism. Therefore, he utilizes the mundane daily minutia in activities that validate Black working-class communities' realities. Wiedle's recites poetic delivery in being passionate about your goals.
A still from The African Desparate. Courtesy of MUBI
The search for art's purpose is posed in conceptual entrepreneur Martine Syms' The African Desperate, which closed this year's New Directors/New Films series at MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Palace (portrayed by a gloomy Diamond Stingily, a visual artist and Martine's friend) attempts to leave upstate New York and avoid her MFA graduation party after going through microaggressions from her school's all-white faculty in her MFA review. As she receives her MFA, she goes through The Testament of a Dead Daughter, where she reads quotes from the eponymous novel and is visibly unhappy throughout her activities, such as swimming in a lake and working on art projects with fellow (primarily white) peers.
No matter how chill the fellow artists are, Palace is never particular about what others want from her and accepts their requests. Stingily brings in her past experiences in the art world to provide not just the deadpan delivery but also the multiple, subtle meanings of a straight face. Throughout the day, she keeps seeing Ezra, a pale oddity who only greets and evacuates. He appears to be a watcher that reminds her of her place. He then reveals his feelings for her in the climax and saves her from her supposed death. Despite being rescued, Palace calls out his weird, racist ass shit for putting her in his car before making love with him in the car when she says, "fuck me, or you're racist." It is a humorous look into examining the differences between pure love versus obsessive infatuation from Ezra's thinking, and the transmits Palace receives.
Though Palace's facial glances are visibly neutral, she finds joy in calling her friends and being a social personality. These calls are an out-of-body experience as the speaker's head is in a small square over the big square containing the listener's body. Its dreamlike square transitions are fantasies that Palace fabricated that reflect standing among racial hierarchies if she was in their shoes. The film's central motifs of defining the future are presented through a partial techno score (partially co-composed by Syms under moniker), fast mini flashes of memes, and a high volume of screens. The score represents an indefinite future that Palace hopes to acquire. The quick pacing of the memes' appearances (e.g., Confused Black Girl, But That's Not My Business featuring Kermit the Frog) are reminders of what Palace witnesses in her interactions. Screens - whether full of penises or backgrounds of a phone call - project perceptions into a person (in this case, Palace). It impacts her perspective on the world and creates inconvenient surveillance where the art world traps her into pursuing specific career paths. With a screenplay that weaves through awkwardness and bleakness, The African Desperate is a flinching satire of making it in the art world.
A still from Rewind and Play. Courtesy of Alain Gomis
Artistry provides room for expression, creativity, and critiquing the world. One of these films demonstrating this purpose and juxtaposition is Alain Gomis's documentary Rewind and Play after its world premiere at Berlinale. In its quick 65 minutes, it follows rushes of an unaired Thelonious Monk interview for the French TV program Jazz Portrait following the end of his ‘69 European tour. After strolling through Paris with his wife Nellie, he walks in on a televised anthropological study where host Henri Renaud (a then jazz musician turned French CBS executive) interviews Monk. Throughout the interview, Renaud asks the same questions repetitively to Monk in multiple takes. Renaud disrespects Monk's privacy when Monk gives Renaud short, concise responses. Renaud later adds statements with Monk’s answers for B-roll segments that perpetuate stereotypes. Knowing how the producers have creative and racial power, Monk sits upright and mainly smiles on the surface while holding his exasperation on the inside.
Renaud and the producers see Monk only for entertainment purposes and as a subject instead of a human being. He then gets Monk to play Round Midnight for the episode's musical performance segment. When you close your eyes while hearing Monk playing Round Midnight in the recording, it is an eloquent soliloquy of moving across time. Your mind glides to the imaginary soothes of life. Yet, despite the beauty of listening to a superb recital, the producers and host disagreed with it and made Monk perform the same song three times. Performing under heavy tungsten lights, Monk is drained after each take. Sweat is dripping from his face, and close-ups of his fingers are nerving after he touches each key. The producers and Renaud are exploiting and making him insert excessive labor in his appearance. These gestures evoke the amount of unnecessary work that Black artists assert and endure to gain respect from white audiences.
As evidenced several times in the interview, Monk did not want to be a part of it from its beginning. It is remarkable for Gomis to get this document out of the shadows to the world and to hold the now-deceased Renaud accountable for constructing a skewed, simplistic, and condescending snapshot of one of the world's greatest pianists. Renaud's final shot is a close-up of his face as he is positioned on the right third. Renaud is being directed by an employee off-camera as if he is "seeing" Monk. Renaud looks concerned as he goes through a self-introspection of his actions. Renaud thinks about the messages the audience will receive if they see the episode and how he will be affiliated and implicated with the footage. His expression would make the audience question his motivations. Did he do it for an ignorant audience that does not have a nuanced knowledge of Black people or himself to gain a boost in his broadcast career by "highlighting" his past acquaintanceship with Monk? Yet, he comprehends the consequences of his actions and how these activities affect each party's well-being and future.