T

Keisha Rae Witherspoon / United States, 14 min., 2019

A film crew follows three grieving participants of Miami’s annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model R.I.P. t-shirts and innovative costumes designed in honor of their dead.

Keisha Rae Witherspoon is an independent filmmaker currently based in South Florida. Her work is driven by interests in science, speculative fiction, and fantasy, as well as documenting the unseen and unheralded nuances of diasporic peoples. She is creative director and co-founder of Third Horizon, a Caribbean artist collective responsible for Papa Machete, which had its U.S. premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Recovery

Kevin Jerome Everson / United States, 10:19 min., 2020

Recovery is about an Airman training to be a pilot at Columbus Air Force Base, 14th Flying Training Wing, in Columbus, Mississippi. The film made its world premiere at Berlinale Forum Expanded. With A1C Xavier Payton, Ssgt. Nazareth Oliver (voice).

Kevin Jerome Everson MFA, Ohio University. BFA, University of Akron. Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Everson was awarded the 2020 Berlin Prize; the 24th Heinz Award in Art and Humanities and was the 2012 recipient of The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video; his films have been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at Courtisane/Cinematek Brussels; Cinema du Reel; Glasgow Shorts; Harvard Film Archive; Tate Modern; Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, Korea; Visions du Reel; The Whitney Museum of American Art; Centre Pompidou. His work has been featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2013 Sharjah Biennial and the 2018 Carnegie International. Everson’s artwork—including photographs, sculptures, and award-winning films, including ten features and over 160 short form works—have been exhibited internationally at film festivals, cinemas, galleries, museums and public and private art institutions.

Untitled

Bradford Young / United States, 3 min., 2019

A memorial to slain rapper, Nipsey Hussle, a meditation on the cathartic nature of collective mourning in the African diaspora.

Bradford Young is an award-winning filmmaker from Louisville, Kentucky. He was the first African-American cinematographer to be nominated for an Academy Award for Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival in 2017. In 2015, he had been awarded the BET Best Movie Award for his cinematographic work on Ava DuVernay’s Selma. He has won Cinematography Awards at the Sundance Film Festival twice: in 2011 for Dee Ree’s Pariah; then in 2013 for Andrew Dosunmu’s Mother of George and David Lowery’s Ain't Them Bodies Saints. He also shot Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), James Spooner’s White Lies, Black Sheep (2007), Dosunmu’s Restless City (2011), and DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere (2012). He was the cinematographer for DuVernay’s 2019 Netflix series, When They See Us. Young studied film at Howard University. He is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers.

blu blak

by King Ali Emeka / United States, 20 min., 2019

19-year-old writer-director King Ali Emeka explores the pitfalls of contemporary black masculinity against the backdrop of L.A.'s fast and youthful skating scene. Emeka portrays the central character of Malcom, a disturbed and paranoid young skater, who navigates through a fever dream fueled by drugs and memories of past devastations.

King Ali Emeka is a director and writer. He recently graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in film studies. As a filmmaker, his work focuses on coming-of-age stories, often shaped around Black and brown youth grappling with the complexities of adolescence. His work has screened at BlackStar Film Festival, winning the juried award for Best Youth Short in 2018. His work has also screened in college classrooms for film studies, such as University of California, Santa Barbara. When he is not busy working on new film projects, Emeka records, mixes, and masters his own music, garnering over 1 million streams with his pop records on Soundcloud, Spotify, and Apple Music.

Alone

Garrett Bradley / United States, 12 min., 2017

What would it mean to marry someone behind bars? 

Garrett Bradley works across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, southern culture, and the history of film in the United States. Bradley has received numerous prizes which include the 2019 Prix de Rome and the 2017 Sundance Jury Prize for the short film Alone, which was released by The New York Times OpDocs, and became an Oscar Contender for short nonfiction filmmaking. In December 2019, Bradley's first solo exhibition opened at The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), curated by Rebecca Matalon. In January of 2020, Bradley became the first Black American woman to receive Best Director in the US Documentary Section of the 2020 Sundance Film festival for her first feature length documentary, Time.

Black Mary

Kahlil Joseph / United States, 6 min., 2017

A Tate commissioned short film inspired by the work of Harlem photographer Roy DeCarava.

Kahlil Joseph is a Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker best known for his large-scale video installations. His most recent work, BLKNWS, a two channel fugitive newscast that blurs the lines between art, journalism, entrepreneurship, and cultural critique, made its international debut in the 58th Venice Biennale earlier this year. Exploring the space between music video, short film and art installation, he has collaborated with artists such as Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, FKA twigs and Shabazz Palaces. He was Emmy and Grammy nominated for his direction of Beyonce’s feature length album film, Lemonade. He currently serves as the artistic director of The Underground Museum, a pioneering independent art museum, exhibition space and community hub in Los Angeles that he co-founded with his late brother, artist and curator, Noah Davis.

PATTAKI 

Everlane Moraes / Cuba, 21 min., 2018

In the dense night, when the moon lifts the tide, beings trapped in the daily life of water scarcity, they are hypnotized by the powers of Yemaya, the goddess of the sea.

Everlane Moraes graduated in Visual Arts at the Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil, and studied Documentary Direction at the Film and TV School - EICTV, Cuba. She is a member of the Association of Black Film Professionals (A.P.A.N), an entity that represents Afro Descendant filmmakers in Brazil. She was selected for the Director’s Summit in the 34th Talents Guadalajara in collaboration with Berlinale 2020, and recently, received a development award from the William Graves Fund. She makes films that move between fiction and documentary, creating a dialogue between philosophical concepts and the socio-cultural issues of the Black diaspora, working in a hybrid aesthetic between visual arts and cinema. A multiple award winner, she has shown her work internationally, in Latin America, Africa, the USA, Russia and Europe.