We hope you’ll agree, February is as good a time as any to celebrate Black film, Black film artists, Black thinkers and activists, and to highlight the legacy of slavery, white supremacy, colonization and capitalism that underpins our unjust society.
Our BHM programming this year includes two series: Icons and Dispatches.
Icons spotlights the accomplishments of American movie stars like Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Samuel L Jackson, Angela Bassett, Chadwick Boseman and others, emulating and transcending the path beaten by Sidney Poitier 60 years ago.
Dispatches turns from fantasy to reality, with a focus on documentaries, ideas, and social justice, including work by and about James Baldwin, Camille Billops, and two exceptional recent Canadian films, Dear Jackie and Our Dance of Revolution.
In addition, we’re starting the month with week-long engagements for two of the most acclaimed movies of last year. Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, from France, is a profoundly rich and fascinating response to the real life trial of an African immigrant for filicide (a trial Diop attended). And Margaret Brown’s award-winning documentary Descendant is a deep dive into the case of the last known slave ship transporting kidnapped Africans to the USA, and what it signifies for the descendants of the slaves, and the slave-runners too.
In these films, and others, we are reminded of how cinema can offer insight as well as spectacle, extend empathy and inspire change.
Get a 3-Ticket Pack for $33*
VIFF+ Member Pricing: $27*
*Ticket pack only valid for Icons and Dispatches films
Icons
Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones, Richard Pryor, Prince, Jamie Foxx, Samuel L Jackson, Kerry Washington, Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman…
This month we celebrate these Icons of American Cinema, brilliant actors all, men and women who have picked up the torch blazed by Sidney Poitier in the 1950s and 60s to become role models for subsequent generations, dispelling stereotypes, transcending reverse-stereotypes, conferring compassion and empathy, as all great actors do.
Get a 3-Ticket Pack for $33*
VIFF+ Member Pricing: $27*
*Ticket pack only valid for Icons and Dispatches films
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings
This boisterous comedy about a breakaway barnstorming Black baseball team in the 1930s should be better known. It's an entertaining gloss on one enterprising ball player's resourceful response to segregated leagues, with Star Wars' Billy Dee Williams.
Under the Cherry Moon (35mm)
Prince is Christopher Tracy, a gigolo on the French Riviera, determined to seduce $50 million heiress Kristin Scott Thomas (!). The pop star's directorial debut is a quirky, fun throwback to old school Hollywood glamour, with knobs on.
Dispatches
Our BHM Dispatches series presents critical non-fiction work by and about Black artists, activists and thinkers, touching on race, gender, equity and identity, “family” and society.
Get a 3-Ticket Pack for $33*
VIFF+ Member Pricing: $27*
*Ticket pack only valid for Icons and Dispatches films
Dear Jackie (Free Screening)
Henri Pardo's film is a cinematic letter to Jackie Robinson, the first African American player in Major League Baseball and a civil rights activist who broke the colour barrier when he joined the minor-league Montreal Royals in 1946. For a short time, the impossible seemed possible in a segregated North America.
James Baldwin Abroad: Istanbul - Paris - London
These three short docs, from 1968 - 1973, offer sharp, piercing glimpses of Baldwin in private and public, sometimes in repose and relaxed but more often holding forth, embroiled in the thorny discourse of racial politics, identity and self expression.
"This Time It's Personal" Films by Camille Billops & James Hatch (Programme 1)
Trailblazing artist and polymath Camille Billops and her partner James Hatch were courageous independent filmmakers who chronicled the ups and downs of their personal lives and family histories, and found in them the temperature of their times.
"This Time It's Personal" Films by Camille Billops & James Hatch (Programme 2)
The second programme in our short selection of independent films by Camille Bishops and James Hatch includes what is probably their masterpiece, Finding Christa, a deeply personal film about Camille's relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption as a child.
New Releases
Descendant
Brown's moving film zeroes in on the descendants of the 110 slaves brought in on the last known slave ship to transport kidnapped Africans to America as human cargo, an illegal shipment undertaken as a bet by a local landowner, Timothy Meaher.
