11th BlackStar Film Festival Weekend Highlights

The BlackStar Film Festival, showcasing visual work from the African diaspora and indigenous communities, is back for its 11th year with screenings around the city and online. There are shorts, panel discussions and even morning yoga. Some of this weekend’s feature highlights include:

Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power

Documentary, Montgomery Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus

Saturday, Aug. 6 at 10 am (also virtual), 90 minutes

Documentary about the fight to vote in poor, rural, racist Lowndes County, Alabama, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lowndes had a population that was 80 percent Black yet had no Black voters.

Wisdom Gone Wild

Documentary, Zellerbach Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus

Saturday, Aug. 6 at 3 pm (virtual at 4 pm), 84 minutes

Documentary from director Rea Tajiri which takes a different look at caregiving and dementia as it examines 15 years in the life of Tajiri’s elderly mother. Rose Noda Tajiri has her family’s Japanese American experience all in her head and it comes out in fits and spurts with little relation to order or time – wisdom gone wild.

Hazing

Documentary, Zellerbach Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus

Saturday, Aug. 6 at 8:30 pm (virtual at 8 pm), 104 minutes

Through talks with survivors and family members of the deceased, documentarian Byron Hunt explores the ritual of underground hazing and its cultural touchstones of groupthink, control, power, toxic masculinity, and race and gender. It also asks why some standby while their friends are being tortured.

Tug of War

Zellerbach Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus

Sunday, Aug. 7 at 11 am (virtual at 12 pm), 90 minutes

There have been other love stories set during regime changes, but not one set during the end of British rule in Zanzibar. Here, an Indian-Zanzibari young woman looks to a freedom fighting revolutionary to help her escape from an arranged marriage.

Mars One

Zellerbach Theater at the Annenberg Center, Penn Campus

Sunday, Aug. 7 at 8:30 am (virtual at 8 pm), 115 minutes, in Portuguese

A Brazilian drama that will resonate with many. The Martins family may be lower-middle-class, but they’re typically optimistic. Their worldview is challenged, however, when a right-wing extremist is elected president.

For more details and tickets go to blackstarfest.org/festival/.