BlackStar Film Festival 2024 Dispatch

Film still from Mahdi Amel in Gaza: On the Colonial Mode of Production, dir. Tareq Rantisi and Mary Jirmanus Saba (2024).

Yaser Murtaja and Roshdi Sarraj are filming themselves swimming in the Mediterranean: “Good morning, Sea, morning of love, good morning, dear Gaza,” gurgles Murtaja—a photojournalist—joyfully. He is treading water. “Good morning, with the crabs under our feet,” adds his colleague and best friend, Sarraj. The two laugh, then dive beneath the surface. This footage, from 2016, is part of Mahdi Amel in Gaza: On the Colonial Mode of Production, a new short film by radical geographer Mary Jirmanus Saba and militant musician Tareq Rantisi. (The title references the Lebanese communist and theorist of “the colonial mode of production” Mahdi Amel, assassinated in 1987.) Thirty years after Amel’s assassination, the two young swimmers set up a media organization dedicated to documenting Gazan life.1 However, Yaser died at the hands of an Israeli sniper as he filmed the Great March of Return in 2018, and Roshdi succumbed to bombardment in his home in 2023, shortly after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood—Hamas’s name for the October 7 attacks—and the subsequent genocidal action against the Strip. The large text on Rantisi and Saba’s screen is forthright with its challenge to the audience regarding these murders: “What is our responsibility to Motaz, to Bisan, to Roshdi, to Yaser? To Gaza?”2 Conversely, the voice-over addresses the dead eponymous Marxist directly: “My dear Mahdi, what if the path of production, subject as it is to capital’s logic of endless accumulation, has taken us on the road to extinction? In this moment of ecological disarray, the ties between the forces of reaction and resource extraction have never been more clear.”

Mahdi Amel in Gaza had its North American premiere in early August at BlackStar 2024, the film festival in Philadelphia whose mission is “to uplift the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists working outside of the confines of genre.”3 The festival is directed by Nehad Khader, a diasporic Palestinian-Philadelphian whose ancestors hail from Haifa. This year, the annual event took place ten months into an accelerated phase of the US-supported Israeli genocide of Palestinians. Appropriately, the focus of many of the most powerful short films was Palestinian resistance. A Stone’s Throw by Razan Al-Salah remembered the bombing of BP pipelines by Haifa oil workers in 1936. Diana Al-Halabi’s The Battle of Empty Stomachs evoked the resistance of hunger-striking Palestinian asylum seekers in Europe. Post-Trauma by Nidal Badarny chronicled terrors experienced in between intifadas, and Dancing Palestine by Lamees Almakkawy profiled the folk dance dabke. Lebanese and Syrian shorts by filmmakers Alia Haju and Ashtar Alahmad addressed wars of displacement overlapping with the Nakba, while feature films Bye Bye Tiberias by Lina Soualem and Life Is Beautiful by Mohamed Jabaly paid homage in different ways to courageous trajectories embarked on from Palestine to Europe and back again.

When the writer and filmmaker Mariam Ghani and I discussed the apparent powerlessness of international humanitarian bodies to halt the ongoing and currently accelerated genocide, she insisted that “global health,” like universal human rights and aid frameworks, all too often follows a neocolonial logic. To quote Anjuli Raza Kolb, one of the people Ghani interviews in her festival documentary Dis-Ease (2024), world medical governance is always functioning—no less than other kinds of law—“in defense of First World health.” Thus to achieve something like true (international) health justice, Kolb argues, human ease and disease will have to be decolonized—understood as inseparable from racial-capitalist ecocide. In Palestine, self-evidently, we are witnessing “an acute public health crisis,” Ghani said, “as well as the full-scale devastation of people, infrastructure, ecosystems, and cultural heritage, which will have effects on the health of everyone who survives it for generations to come.” The Gazan lifeworld lies in ruins. But in their drive to ethnically cleanse or “purify” stolen land—by annihilating the indigenous population that politicians frequently call “cancer” or “vermin”—Israeli settler-colonists kill the sustainability of their own lifeways also.

Abstract cartoon shapes, black and ominous, move like spiders across the screen, and then throw themselves upon a lineup of pale pink human forms wearing caps and pale blue laborers’ overalls. Every time one of these spiders picks up a worker, drains him, and throws him down lifeless, the monster subsequently divides and self-replicates. Cue the antibiotic counteroffensive! This is the infomercial “The Traitor Within,” disseminated by the American Cancer Society in 1946. In Dis-Ease, Ghani samples this and myriad other archival materials about the human body and its “bugs,” in an inquiry into capitalism’s relationship to ill-health. This body is always, as it were, politic. Many of Ghani’s corporate and state propaganda sources, like the American Cancer Society video, bear war-like titles about fifth columns or saboteurs, and evince hyper-nationalist militaristic frameworks. A Puck cartoon from 1883 personifies “Cholera” as a figure “invading” Britain on a boat, wearing loose pants and a fez. “Our body is just like a country that has been invaded by an enemy army,” explains the National Motion Picture Company in 1940.

Besides national “defense,” Ghani’s essay-film interweaves interviews and collages tracing the histories of other die-hard American fantasies as well—for example, individual responsibility, colonial beneficence, and the threats of alien body-snatching, sexual perversion, racial contamination, and “red” ideology spreading like a contagion. Ghani animates these archives by layering them experimentally with disease microscopy. As she tells the story of various global “wars” on disease, she draws from dozens of anti-racist scholar-activists, including medical anthropologist Edna Bonhomme, disability liberationist Johanna Hedva, legal theorist Patricia Williams, and sociologist Hannah Landecker. “Before germ theory,” explains Sonia Shah, a health journalist, in the film’s opening, “people thought diseases were part of the environment.” Ironically, at the close of the movie, it is to the environment that we return, with a discussion of the pathogenic effects of “slow violences” such as colonial ecosystem destruction, species extinction, antibiotic overuse, low wages, and environmental racism.

Medicine, for health-equity activists, is not confined to the body, but transforms the whole system of social relations that cause sickness in the first place: public infrastructure and climate reparations as “cure.” Ghani’s Dis-Ease concludes, as such, with a call to “abandon the war metaphor” and instead view health as a continuous and mutual state, oriented toward the collective curation of our microbiome. Here, health would cease to be an individual possession to fearfully guard. The good life, in the doc’s final shots, is rather “about being able to live with and through all of the pain and all of the suffering,” as Bharat Venkat, author of The Limits of Cure (2021), offers—“but also all the joy.” Ruling-class fantasies of immortality and optimization have poisoned our groundwater, yet many are fighting back with the knowledge that we are all only temporarily a part of this world. We are all becoming-disabled, and that’s okay.4

I heard variations on this view echo across the festival, not least in short films by Kynan Tegar (Indai Apai Darah [Mother, Father, Blood], about the interspecies economy of the Sungai Utik people of Dayak Iban in Indonesia), Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah (And Still, It Remains, about Escamaran pastoralists in the Hoggar Mountains in the wake of France’s testing of atomic bombs in the Saharan desert sixty years ago), and Kyhynngy Oyuur (Syppyt Suruktar [Lost Letters], about graphically animated Sakha youths falling through time into a capitalism-ruined landscape in Yakutia). Deep ecology in fact permeated BlackStar. There were features on forests (Family Tree by Jennifer McArthur), buffalos (Bring Them Home by Ivan MacDonald, Ivy MacDonald, and Daniel Glick), and land defense (Standing Above the Clouds by Jalena Keane-Lee). A dedicated slate of shorts presented environmental fightback in Algeria, Borneo, the Caribbean, and Chicago.5 Others films, too, touched on resistance to environmental racism, including Maasai director Laissa Malih’s Enchukonoto—inquiring into the possibility of Maasai subsistence—and Black Ag by US-Iranian filmmaker Andy Sarjahani, who worked with farmers in the Arkansas delta.

Artistic treatments of settler-colonial ecocide were ubiquitous even beyond the Palestinian films. Struggles against what historian Patrick Wolfe calls “the elimination of the native”6 were animated throughout the weekend, sometimes in multispecies terms, via the works of artists like Sámi storytellers Sunná Nousuniemi and Tuomas Kumpulainen, Polynesian high-school romance fabulators Ramon Te Wake and Damon Fepule’ai, and various native Americans: Anishinaabe director ishkwaazhe Shane McSauby, Kānaka ‘Ōiwi (Hawaiian) artist Tiare Ribeaux, Cherokee-Chinese-Norwegian sound recordist Jody Stillwater, and Mohawk filmmaker Katsitsionnni Fox. In the feature documentary Our Land, Our Freedom by Zippu Kumundu and Meena Nanji, the atrocities of the British against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army are not only exposed, but treated as ongoing. Aged ninety-five, the Mau Mau militant Mukami Kimathi recites, with a twinkle, an injunction to follow her daughter’s YouTube channel, drumming up support for the family’s work claiming back land stripped from Kimathi’s guerrilla comrades in the 1950s (and withheld even after Jomo Kenyatta took power in 1963).

Looking further back in time, Pierre Michel Jean’s Twice Into Oblivion shows Dominicans and Haitians coming together to make ensemble theater memorializing the massacre of twenty-thousand Haitians living in the Dominican Republic in 1937, under the order of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Reaching further still into the timeline of imperial violence, three disparate short films—by Welket Bungué (Angular Phoenix), Suneil Sanzgiri (Two Refusals [Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?]), and Luis Arnías (Bisagras)—meditate speculatively on the consequences of Portugal’s colonization of Goa, Angola, Guinea, and Brazil. In Sanzgiri’s transfixing visual poem, originally played on two channels at the Brooklyn Museum, the flickering frame combines animation, archival footage, and a script written by poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. The film strives to attain memory of the Goan freedom-fighter Sharada Sawaikar and Goan-Angolan communist Sita Valles. “Adamastor,” whispers the imagined ancestor reproachfully in Konkani—grieving the arrival of Vasco de Gama on India’s shores while directly addressing the mythic storm-god who governs the Cape of Good Hope—“why would you allow it?” The words sound akin to the famous “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

Speaking of forsaken subjects, Nehad Khader, the festival director, clearly wanted to emphasize a strand of queer and transfeminist utopianism in contemporary indie filmmaking. More than a dozen films held up LGBT lives rooted everywhere from Guam (Wouldn’t Make It Any Other Way by Hao Zhou), to Pakistan (The Queen of My Dreams by Fawzia Mirza), Tamil Nadu (Amma’s Pride by Shiva Krish), Nigeria (The Archive: Queer Nigerians by Simisolaoluwa Akande), and Ghana (God Is Grey by Jennifer Drake). Additionally, films not billed as queer, like Damien Hauser’s After the Long Rains, featured a Kenyan ten-year-old’s utopian refusal of the idea that fishing is gendered work. In Seeking Mavis Beacon, filmmaker Jazmin Jones’s desire to be intimate with the iconic (fictive) touch-typing avatar is excessive and avowedly weird if not neatly queer. The grand queer premiere, however, on BlackStar’s opening night, packing out all tiers of the Kimmel Center, was the high-budget multilocation American road-trip narrative Dreams in Nightmares by Shatara Michelle Ford, who luminously shoots four dark-skinned fabulous femmes as they end up finding their joy as neocolonial tourists in Oaxaca. (Ford joked that her movie was “in conversation with Sex and the City.”) Towards the other end of the budget spectrum, an Afro-Brazilian bisexual repairman’s optimistic, self-healing confrontation with heteronormative coloniality was the subject of a short called Mend (or Remendo in the original Portuguese) by Roger Ghil, aka GG Fákọ̀làdé.

Strikingly, the BlackStar festival’s land acknowledgement insists on the impossibility of repair, even as it articulates its commitment to the “unsettling” horizon of decolonization.7 In a four-minute video, the curatorial statement defines the role of art, humbly, as “an opening,” fostering support for “movements of colonized people” refusing the “ongoing genocide and displacement” of Indigenous and Black people “from Palestine to Puerto Rico and everywhere in between.” Class treachery is implicitly part of this non-reparative liberatory vision, insofar as the character of a financial real-estate executive—played by the Swiss-Rwandan actor Kayije Kagame—turns against her job and sets fire to the La Défense quarter of Paris in one of my favorite shorts of the weekend, Valentin Noujaïm’s To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion. In another testament to this embrace of the “irreparable” that is central to the anti-colonial feminism privileged by Khader, the program concluded with The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. Shot on 16 mm by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, this feature-length “anti-biopic”8 dwells in slow, wordless, tropical surrealist sequences, exploring the limits of the fantasy of stitching the early twentieth-century Martinican writer—who burned her papers, destroying the archive of herself—into the fabric of the present.

A comparable meta-auto-theoretic method is employed by Onyeka Igwe in her short film A Radical Duet, which uses critical fabulation to invent lost Black Marxist theater productions staged by lesser-known figures in the postwar London milieu of C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter. Meanwhile, two contrasting feature-length approaches to Black feminist history were also screened on BlackStar 2024’s final day, alongside the ambivalent paean to Suzanne Césaire. On the one hand, Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s older and more traditional documentary A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995) was narrated largely by Lorde herself. On the other, It Was All a Dream by dream hampton follows another traditional path by making the award-winning filmmaker from Detroit the questing subject of this feminist ode to hip-hop, repairing the relative absence of femaleness like hers in the milieu she loves.

Despite the big splashes made by Philadelphia directors—Shatara Michelle Ford with Dreams in Nightmares on opening night, and Darius Clarke Monroe with Dallas, 2019 later—it was other movies that shed light on my adoptive city. Visceral feelings of community pride permeated the conversation between the viewers, makers, and subjects of Kristal Sotomayor’s short doc Expanding Sanctuary, which arises from the migrant- and undocumented-led organization Juntos and its struggle to end the city’s Preliminary Arraignment Reporting System and to drive Immigration and Customs Enforcement out of the state.9 Similarly, when the local dance fanatics Bryant “Diddy” Lee, Jazmin “Jenesis” Gilber, Christian “Mach Phive” Walker, and Anthony Lloyd came on stage alongside Philly-based director Aidan Un at the Kimmel, the adoration poured on them from the audience was uproarious. Un’s extraordinary feature documentary You Don’t Have to Go Home, But… inhabits the legendary dance party Second Sundae and takes as its title the catchphrase voiced every end-of-night by party host Steve Believe (the second half is the catty, jovial “but you can’t stay here!”). This jokey framing is deceptive, since Un’s impeccably composed film-essay is essentially a poised, thumping, esoteric theorization of working-class collective survival through dance.

The insistence that people literally cannot exist without one another’s friendship is also the premise of the aforementioned Life Is Beautiful, an autobiographical narrative about a Gazan filmmaker who finds himself stranded in the Norwegian city of Tromsø when the Rafah border crossing is indefinitely closed. Mohamed’s friends in Gaza City tell him, via video call, that “life is beautiful,” and as improbable as it may appear to the outsider, he knows it is true. Growing his hair long in protest at his exile, he continues to be alive thanks to his northern European chosen family, although he waits in limbo for years, first for an artist visa, then for an appeal to be granted against the denial of his leave to remain in Norway. After learning to ski on land governed by this leading Scandinavian petro-state, Mohamed tenderly writes the word “غزة” (Gaza) in the snow.