Letter From The Editor

In March of this year, BlackStar held our sixth annual Greaves Seminar at Stanford University. It’s an intimate event for filmmakers, scholars, writers, and curators to discuss and think about the ideas we’re wrestling with as Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists. The quote above is from the keynote address, delivered by filmmaker Michèle Stephenson.

It’s easy to think we are alone as artists. The path is arduous, filled with rejection and self-doubt; and we are often wrestling with uncomfortable and difficult questions. Stephenson reminds us that we are part of a lineage of storytellers who preceded us and will come after us, and that they too tussled with telling the story the way they wanted to tell it.

This quote is one of many that resonated for me when listening to Stephenson’s keynote, titled “Create Dangerously: Remembering Black Bodies in Motion.” I asked her if we could include an abbreviated version in this issue, and she kindly agreed. Stephenson talks about telling stories on her own terms, refusing to be legible in the world of nonfiction, especially when Black and Brown life is involved. She also discusses why truth and form do not always come with resolution and clarity and why we should honor that opacity.

The young woman you see pictured on the cover is none other than Michèle Stephenson herself. It was taken when she was nine years old. Her direct gaze, her insouciance, her interrogating curiosity capture what I hope this issue feels like as you read through it.

From Bedatri Choudhury’s profile on Watermelon Pictures, the Palestinian American distribution company bringing Arab films to the masses, to Juliana Reyes’s feature on two censored Filipino documentaries about people disappeared by the Philippine government—we create anyway.

From a hard conversation on the ethics of making The Perfect Neighbor (2025) with Geeta Gandbhir and Natalie Bullock Brown to what it means to burn it all down in Simone Leigh and Madeline Hunt Ehrlich’s short film Conspiracy (2022)—we create anyway.

From Roya Rastegar’s grappling with Iran, the diaspora, and her remembrance of Marjane Satrapi to Tre Johnson’s feature on Mahershala Ali and why his lead action role in the new movie, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (2026) feels like it was meant for him—we create anyway.

I want to thank my section editors, Kavita Rajanna, Camille Acker, and Yasmine Espert, for their thoughtful, hard work on this issue. I am only as good as my team, and my team is at the top of their game: Shauna Swartz for her diligent copyediting, Akua Maat for her operations wizardry and calm, Zendra Shariff for her attention to detail, Autumn Valdez for her organization, Maori Karmael Holmes for her ideas and guidance, and Raquel Hazell, whose art direction fills these pages once again.