BlackStar Film Festival Announces 2026 Opening and Closing Night Selections

BlackStar Projects, the premier organization celebrating visionary Black, Brown and Indigenous film and media artists, is thrilled to announce two powerful and timely films as the opening and closing night selections for the 2026 BlackStar Film Festival. West Side Familia, directed by Taylor Hosking, will be the Opening Night selection, making its world premiere on August 6th, at 8:00PM, at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Center City Philadelphia. Black Lions – Roman Wolves, directed by Haile Gerima, will be the Closing Night selection, making its North America premiere on August 9th, at 7:30PM, also at the Kimmel Center. Passes are on sale now.

“We are thrilled to open and close the 2026 BlackStar Film Festival with two films that embody our commitment to visionary cinema from the global majority,” said Nehad Khader, Festival Director. “These are critically complex and formally innovative films that reconsider history from the perspective of the Black and Brown people who forged it.”

Taylor Hosking’s feature documentary West Side Familia tells the story of a Puerto Rican community in Manhattan’s Upper West Side whose cultural and political influence helped shape New York City, all while remaining largely erased from its official history. The film begins when Hosking witnesses neighborhood elders scaling a traffic light pole to hang a Puerto Rican flag ahead of the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade, a decades-long tradition they continue to fight to preserve amid rapid gentrification. That moment launches a deeply personal investigation into the hidden history of the neighborhood and the generations of activists, artists, musicians and community leaders who transformed it into a cultural force. Through archival footage and conversations with elders who lived the history firsthand, the film uncovers stories of resistance, celebration and survival that connect the Upper West Side to broader movements across New York and the Puerto Rican diaspora. At once cinematic, joyful and politically urgent, West Side Familia is both a love letter to a disappearing New York and a living archive of the people determined to keep its spirit alive.

Closing the film festival will be Haile Gerima’s Black Lions – Roman Wolves, a five-part epic in which each episode can be seen and stand on its own, that explores Ethiopian resistance to Italy’s 1935 invasion, revealing a war fought with arms, memory and culture while honoring a nation that refused to kneel. Gerima, a veteran of the L.A. Rebellion and New Black Cinema, spent 30 years on this monumental exploration of the history and mythology of Italian occupation that also commemorates the Ethiopian resistance. With archival material, conversations with historical witnesses and his father’s plays, Gerima weaves together a panorama of European complicity and Black solidarity. Black Lions – Roman Wolves sets Ethiopian voices against lasting colonialist lies, the recordings of the resistance against both the reproduction of colonial images and the entrenched visual dominance of the colonisers.

Passes are on sale now for the festival, which runs from August 6-9, 2026. Jury award winners will be announced on Monday, August 10. Individual tickets will go on sale July 7.

For more information on the festival, visit https://www.blackstarprojects.org/festival.

About Taylor Hosking

Taylor Hosking is a journalist, producer and filmmaker who started off culture writing in The Atlantic and VICE newsrooms and later show-ran audio documentaries for clients like HBO, Amazon and The New Yorker. She is a third-generation New Yorker from Manhattan’s Upper West Side premiering her debut film, the feature documentary West Side Familia.

About Haile Gerima

Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker, born and raised in Ethiopia. Gerima emigrated to the United States in 1967. Following in the footsteps of his father, a dramatist and playwright, Gerima is a storyteller producing films and sharing his gift in classes in Washington, DC where he lives with his family.

About BlackStar Projects

BlackStar Projects, founded in 2012 by Maori Karmael Holmes as BlackStar Film Festival, creates the spaces and resources needed to uplift the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists working outside the confines of genre. Beyond the annual film festival the organization produces year-round programs, including film screenings, exhibitions, a filmmaker seminar, a film production lab and a journal of film, art and visual culture.

These programs provide artists opportunities for viable strategies for collaborations with other artists, audiences, funders and distributors. BlackStar is working towards a liberatory world in which a vast spectrum of Black, Brown and Indigenous experiences is irresistibly celebrated in arts and culture.