BlackStar Film Festival: “Anthropogenic” Shorts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
128 N Broad St.
Philadelphia
August 2, 2024
I was dissociating in a dark, air-conditioned theater when the words of an Indigenous community leader spoke to me past the screening: “Only the impacts of our actions will be proof of our existence.”
It was an alarmingly egoless thought to hear at a film festival, of all places. Except that the Philly-based film fest I was attending isn’t exactly your typical give-out-awards-and-network event: It was BlackStar, a year-round programming initiative aimed at uplifting “the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists working outside of the confines of genre.”
One facet of that work is the annual showcasing of global storytelling talent in humble Philadelphia. That four-day festival is — from the even humbler perspective of one depressed audience member — not just about recognizing unsung artistry, but about feeding the masses some masticable media that’s more than empty calories.
Out of dozens of thematic screenings, panels and workshops, I attended just one: A collection of under-30-minute films competing under the category of “Anthropogenic” shorts.
Though BlackStar’s Wikipedia page likens the Philly festival to “Black Sundance,” there were fewer than 20 people gathered inside Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’s cozy theater where the shorts were screened Friday night.
The rest of you missed out. Over the course of the evening, I traveled from New York City to Puerto Rico, with pit stops in Algeria and Indonesia. Here’s what stood out to me most: Despite the fact that the five films I saw were necessarily competing with one another, it was the framing of those five as a continuous collection that made each video so compelling on its own.
The set kicked off with “Ardida,” a three-minute, experimental animation critiquing the contradictions of life in late-stage capitalist America. It presents the world through the eyes of a girl who is torn between her Indigenous roots and her indignant present, as she battles extractivist Brooklyn bros while trying to establish internal peace.
It was, incidentally or not, the perfect introduction for someone like me — a detached and increasingly apathetic American with no cultural context other than sheer chaos — to a series of stories about communities fighting for their survival amid neocolonial pressure and climate disaster.
The quote at the beginning of this article, for example, was said by a Dayak Iban elder from Sungai Utik, a village in Borneo that was successfully preserved by its people during a 1973 fight against rampant deforestation on the island. The short was directed by Kynan Tegar, a 19-year-old filmmaker from Sungai Utik himself.
While young, Tegar is a masterful documentarian: He tells a million stories through imagery alone while using the recorded recollection of his ancestors’ fight for their land in the late ‘70s. For example, just as we hear about the elder’s discovery of an excavator “tearing through our territory” through the alarm of “omen birds” terrified by the scene, we see Tegar zoom in on the high-definition textures of feathers found in the rainforest, following one feather’s journey from the wing of a bird to the crown of a headdress. It demonstrates the kind of abundance — of resources, of cultural and social meaning — that results from respecting the land on which we live.
Without too much time to dwell on the young talent of Tegar, I can say that his film is emblematic of a unique perspective matched only by the other filmmakers similarly featured on Friday night. The three subsequent stories all followed a similar formula: Contrasting audio narrative from a selected ambassador of the community with ample visual perspective of the place itself.
In other words, we get to hear from the mouths of life-long members of those communities about what kinds of challenges they’re facing — and then see the larger life flourishing everyday in those places that merit preservation.
My favorite short was “Farmers of the Sea,” in which Puerto Rican filmmaker Juan Carlos Dávila pairs an extended interview with a fisherman in the Caribbean island of Vieques about his work, life, and the effect of military drilling and industrial overfishing in his home with epic footage of what it looks like to live off the sea: The biweekly art of building lobster traps, the abrasive slaps of tumultuous waves against the boat, the gorgeous aquatic life that persists despite the destruction of reefs.
Just like in Sungai Utik, where the community had to work against grossly powerful forces to halt deforestation, the fisherman declares that “there was never an agency that tried to stop” navy target practices in the area and that “it was the fisherman of Vieques that had to take care of it” through organized protest.
Cooing “tan preciosa” at a little girl while grilling his catch, the fisherman says that the goal is “not only leaving the opportunity for them to be fishermen,” but also leaving “places to fish.”
It’s all a reminder of the elder’s philosophical assertion: “Only the impacts of our actions will be proof of our existence.”
That sentiment suggests that to exist is to have community values that establish an embodied relationship to life itself. The next film, Erika Valenciana’s “Broken Flight,” shows an almost comically shattered version of that by filming the “Chicago Collision Bird Monitors,” who spend their days rescuing birds who crash into glass skyscrapers.
The film takes the work seriously, illuminating the sincere sensitivity of the individuals running around Chicago with Butterfly nets. But it’s hard not to find irony in the intensity with which they tackle the job, especially considering the degree of human hardship spotlit in the other films, like the final, award-winning short “And Still, It Remains,” which documents life in the village of Mertoutek, a desert-like environment in Algeria nearly but not entirely decimated by the detonation of atomic bombs in the area by France.
Still, in between shots of blood gushing from the small skulls of songbirds dead on the sidewalk, one “collision monitor” remarks that “there’s something spiritual” about saving a bird from a skyscraper, about nursing it back to health and releasing it back into the world as though human intervention had never hurt it at all.
Altogether, the films show the perseverance and power of small communities with deep beliefs — as well as the layers of systematic violence that either connect us to the truths of our times or keep us trapped in societies that promise only the illusion of freedom.
I couldn’t help but feel that it was freedom that the birdwatchers were actually striving for through the act of returning wild birds to flight. While many of the other communities shown onscreen are successful in their fights to maintain independence against invasive forces, it’s absurd that in America, the country which has always branded itself the land of the free, that we are so often stuck, unable to come together in any which way to make genuine change that could reconnect us to the meaning of “place.”
While my personal state of detachment was disrupted by the significant statements recorded by these documentarians, I still left the theater carrying the same sense of despair and dread that I credit my country for instilling in me.
“There’s always a catch,” a woman exclaimed contentedly in “Farmers of the Sea,” reflecting on the abundant beauty of waiting patiently to reel in something real from a different world into one’s own.
I tried hard to access that kind of perspective. But from where I was sitting, in a bare, black-out theater, I couldn’t help but feel like a cog in the machine — a passive consumer with no clue how to catalyze change within my own country as it wreaks havoc on others.
I went home and peeled a can of tuna open for my roommate’s cat, noticed Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 cracked open on our coffee table, and pinched myself to prove I exist.
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Learn more about BlackStar and read more about each of the films referenced in this article here.
