The Philadelphia Film Society announced the full lineup for the milestone 35th Philadelphia Film Festival on Wednesday, which runs Oct. 15-25 across the Film Society Center, Film Society Bourse and Film Society East locations.\u00a0Black artists will bookend the festival\u00a0and Black stories across the diaspora from Harlem, Baltimore, Lagos, Nigeria; Bangui, Central African Republic; Kigali, Rwanda; and Kenya will fill its sections.<\/p>\n
For its 35th edition, the Philadelphia Film Society added a screen, programmed more films than the festival has ever shown, and built more events around visiting guests, panels and conversations.<\/p>\n
“It’s a bigger event, which I think is right for our 35th anniversary,” J. Andrew Greenblatt, the society’s CEO and executive director, says. “We probably could have taken a couple dozen more films if we had the space.”<\/p>\n
The expansion comes at a good moment for the industry, per Greenblatt. Theatrical exhibition has rebounded this year, and he points to what he calls the highest-grossing movie, \u201cSpider Man: Brand New Day,\u201d and highest-grossing weekend ever in the U.S., July 31-Aug. 2, with the year on pace to match 2019 before the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. He says “there’s an optimistic feeling in the industry.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
During the selection process, Greenblatt attends Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival and tries a new festival each year. The society’s artistic director, Michael Lerman, and other programmers cover the Venice Film Festival, South by Southwest, Tribeca Festival and Fantastic Fest.<\/p>\n
Greenblatt says election starts with the local audience. The society draws more than 250,000 people a year across its three venues, which gives programmers a clear sense of which directors, actors and screenwriters bring Philadelphians out. The festival also seeks global films that “challenge, educate and inform audiences about key issues and other cultures.”<\/p>\n
That approach is how Greenblatt sets the festival apart from a crowded fall calendar that includes festivals in New York, the Hamptons and Montclair, New Jersey. He calls Philadelphia’s event a “survey festival” that screens widely and brings the year’s best work to the city first.<\/p>\n
Here’s some films featuring Black creatives and talent to look for at this year’s festival.<\/p>\n
Films from America<\/p>\n
Ten features center Black filmmakers, stories or leads, spanning three continents and more than a century of history \u2014 among them is “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.” In 1972, pioneering Black filmmaker William Greaves threw a party at Duke Ellington’s home and filmed surviving giants of the Harlem Renaissance, including Arna Bontemps, Aaron Douglas, Eubie Blake and James Van Der Zee as they reminisced, argued and laughed for four hours.<\/p>\n
Greaves died in 2014 with the footage unfinished. His son, David Greaves, completed the film, with granddaughter Liani Greaves producing. It has played Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, Telluride and the New York Film Festival, and will have its theatrical release on Oct. 16.<\/p>\n
Dawn Porter’s documentary “When a Witness Recants” revisits the 1983 killing of 14-year-old DeWitt Duckett in a hallway at Baltimore’s Harlem Park Junior High. Three Black 16-year-olds were convicted on coerced testimony from child witnesses and spent 36 years in prison before they were exonerated.<\/p>\n
Porter tells the story of the men known as the Harlem Park Three through depositions, archival material and graphic-novel animation. Executive producer Ta-Nehisi Coates grew up in that West Baltimore community.<\/p>\n
“Jean-Michel Basquiat,” directed by Quinn Whitney Wilson and Viridiana Lieberman, is the first Basquiat documentary approved by the artist’s estate and the first directed by a person of color. It tells his story through his sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, who also serve as executive producers.<\/p>\n
The film traces his Haitian and Puerto Rican family roots in Brooklyn, his years in the downtown punk scene, and his rise. Wilson, Lizzo’s former creative director, makes her feature directing debut. The film premiered at Tribeca and is headed to Netflix.<\/p>\n
Director Ava DuVernay’s “14th” follows her documentary “13th,” which examined the amendment that abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. The new film turns to the 14th Amendment and what its promise of citizenship and equal protection means today.<\/p>\n
Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and historians Eric Foner and David Blight are among the film’s voices. The film plays in the State of the Union section after its New York Film Festival world premiere. Netflix debuts it on Dec. 4.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In “Being Heumann,” “CODA” director Si\u00e2n Heder dramatizes the 1977 Section 504 sit-in that launched the disability rights movement. Ray Fisher plays activist Chuck Jackson. Antwan Tolliver plays Brad Lomax, the Black Panther whose party fed the protesters during the occupation.<\/p>\n
Films from Africa<\/p>\n
In “Clarissa,” Nigerian twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri move Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” to present-day Lagos. Sophie Okonedo and India Amarteifio share the title role across decades, with David Oyelowo, Ayo Edebiri and Toheeb Jimoh in the cast.<\/p>\n
Shot on 35mm entirely in Nigeria, the film premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, only the second Nigerian feature ever selected at the festival. Neon releases it in select theaters on Dec. 11.<\/p>\n
Okonedo also leads “Mouse,” a Made in USA drama from Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, the team behind “Saint Frances.”<\/p>\n
Rafiki Fariala’s “Congo Boy” turns the director’s own life into a musical drama. Fariala lived through war in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a child and later saw it follow his family to the Central African Republic.<\/p>\n
The film follows Robert, a 17-year-old Congolese refugee in Bangui who raises his four siblings after their parents’ arrest while chasing a win in a music competition. Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset won best actor in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section for the lead role.<\/p>\n
Marie-Cl\u00e9mentine Dusabejambo’s “Ben’Imana” is set in Rwanda in 2012. It follows V\u00e9n\u00e9randa, a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi who leads community reconciliation sessions, until her daughter’s unexpected pregnancy tests her convictions.<\/p>\n
Dusabejambo is the first Rwandan director in Cannes’ Official Selection. Her debut feature won the Cam\u00e9ra d’Or for best first film and the FIPRESCI Prize.<\/p>\n
In “Kikuyu Land,” Kenyan journalist Bea Wangondu, who directed with Andrew H. Brown, investigates her country’s promise to return land to the Kikuyu people. The story unravels into corruption, child labor, and family secrets on the tea plantations, showing how colonial economics still shape Kenya more than 60 years after independence. It screens in the festival’s Community Screenings section.<\/p>\n
Films from Philadelphia<\/p>\n
The Filmadelphia section, the festival’s showcase for films about Philadelphia or by filmmakers with ties to the city, has six features this year, four of them world premieres. A seven-film shorts program rounds it out.<\/p>\n
The section includes films like “Big Phan,” made by Flourtown native Hoag Kepner about the Phillie Phanatic, indie horror drama\u00a0“I Don’t Want to Drink Your Blood Anymore” featuring a Japanese American teenage vampire suffering from agoraphobia caused by the trauma from the night her family was murdered and she was turned, and a documentary destigmatizing drug treatments by Doree Simon Hatfield.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The film to lookout for is “Fletcher Street” from David Darg and Jannat Gargi, which profiles the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club. At the North Philadelphia stable, founder Ellis “El-Dog” Ferrell, his son Darrin Ferrell, and other club leaders have passed Black urban cowboy culture down through generations.<\/p>\n
The club inspired Netflix’s “Concrete Cowboy.” Questlove is an executive producer, and The Roots’ James Poyser composed the score. The film also presses the city on a 2023 promise of new stables in East Fairmount Park that riders are still waiting on.<\/p>\n
Also in the program are the world premiere of Justin Crowell’s “Philly Pretzels,” the North American premiere of Vadim Egoul’s “Casualty,” “Deuce Purgatory,” “The Second Life of Freddie Nole,” “Six Sixty Six,” and “The Wonka of Worcester.”<\/p>\n
The local films share the festival with the year’s most decorated international titles, a placement that can launch a film’s life on the circuit.<\/p>\n
“Filmadelphia titles are judged by the same standard as the rest of the program,” Greenblatt emphasizes. The local films could stand alone, but their hometown ties excite audiences even more.<\/p>\n
Philadelphia Film Society’s 35th film festival<\/p>\n
Noah Segan’s “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,” featuring Giancarlo Esposito co-staring with John Turturro, opens the festival, and Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Debut,” with\u00a0Halle Bailey and K. Todd Freeman joining Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, closes it on Oct. 25.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Black performers also appear across the program. Kirby Howell-Baptiste and British musician Shygirl are in the centerpiece “Club Kid.” William Jackson Harper, Wunmi Mosaku and Devyn Tyler appear in Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” and Jay Lycurgo stars in Clio Barnard’s “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.”<\/p>\n
With more than 100 features and a couple of dozen shorts, the Philadelphia festival usually has the largest slate of festivals, according to Greenblatt. It ranges from awards contenders to small American independents and documentaries that may never return to a theater, along with international films that are starting to draw more attention.<\/p>\n
The society partners year-round with the ACCESS program to offer low-cost admission. During the festival, it waives the price entirely for select screenings in the State of the Union section and the PFF On Us series.<\/p>\n
“We want the economic boundaries gone so everyone has a chance to enjoy the festival,” Greenblatt says.<\/p>\n
The moments he loves most are the ones nobody predicts. He recalled an early screening of “The Artist” during one of his first trips to Cannes. The film had little buzz at the time and went on to win the Oscar for best picture, and he later brought it to Philadelphia audiences.<\/p>\n
For festivalgoers, his advice is simple: Read the first line of every title in the program guide or online, and follow whatever catches your interest.<\/p>\n
“It may not be the biggest film in the program, and that’s the best part,” he says. “You may find your new favorite film.”<\/p>\n