Awarded Grants

For BlackStar Film Festival general operating support.

The 2020 film grant will support "Smile4Kime," a collaborative auto-ethnographic documentary. The film explores the mental health journeys of two women: Kime, an African American woman who lived with dissociative identity disorder after a series of sexual assaults and Elena (the director), a Puerto Rican woman dealing with depression and grief after the death of Kime. The film incorporates interviews, experimental/performance footage, and animation to explore grief, friendship, and intimacy across mental illness, considering important themes of race, gender, and mental health.

The 2020 film grant will support "Ave Maria," a documentary that follows a Puerto Rican celebrity chef who cooks to save the spirit of his homeland in the wake of Hurricane Maria, the catastrophic breaking point for an island ensnared by colonial-era laws and an insurmountable debt. Could something as intrinsic as food be the key to Puerto Rico's future?

This one-year grant will support a professional digital media skills program for formerly incarcerated individuals.

The 2020 film grant will support "InVade" which tells the story of an 8-year-old boy who is detained along with his father during an ICE raid. The father and son are separated, prompting the son to escape and venture out to find him.

The 2020 film grant will support "La Lucha Sigue." The documentary centers immigrant rights leaders who are calling for the Berks Detention Center, one of three prisons that detain immigrant children, to close. Characters such as a mother from Mexico who is teaching her kids about social movements, and an elder who spent part of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp, explain how the immigration industrial complex has impacted various communities of color. The characters portray how to hold elected officials accountable and organize on a local level through art, storytelling, and creative actions.

The 2020 film grant will support "Dilemma of a Bird in a Mirror," a soft-horror fever dream where a femme's psyche splits as she struggles through societal expectations on the eve of her birthday. This is an approximately 25-minute fiction short film, featuring an all POC (people of color) cast, addressing identity, conformity, disability, mental health, and transformation. Drawing on absurdist theater, existential nihilism, queerness, and their intersections with disability, this film is influenced by the underground aesthetics of filmmakers like Jodorowsky, Lynch, and La Nouvelle Vague experimentation to tell the story of a main character's nervous breakdown and eventual recovery and transformation.

The 2020 film grant will support "Another Life." The film explores the childhood experiences of the filmmaker and her family in the Federal Witness Protection Program (which provides for the security and safety of government witnesses). Johnson-Young crafts a journey of discovery using memory, personal photographs, archival footage, and interviews that puts the pieces of her life back together.

The 2020 film grant will support "in love, in memory." In the wake of her son's murder, Shalon Buskirk assembles intimate memories and intergenerational stories to reframe her loss within her city's haunting legacy of displacement. This meditative portrait resists the erosive forces of time and violence by keeping her son Parris' life ever-present.

A program that teaches individuals how to produce video, film, and theatre content to create media that represents diverse cultures in society.