The New Black Film Rebellion | Black Writers Week

So far, Youmans says he’s encouraged by number of recent films which have depicted Black Panthers or Black Power in some form. “To me, I feel like you’re getting different things with all these different pieces; it’s creating a mosaic of what the Black Power experience is. It feels like we’re really building up an appetite and curiosity into that cultural era, specifically.” With all the increased coverage of the subject matter, Youmans felt even more of a responsibility to represent the movement in a specific light, especially since the NOLA Panthers aren’t as well-known as their analogues in California, New York, and Chicago. While he was still in high school, Youmans got to know some of the surviving NOLA Panthers and their stories have formed the basis of “Magnolia Bloom”‘s screenplay. “My responsibility is to uphold the heroism and the truth of their experiences. I became sort of enamored with them because they showed me so much about what the Black Power movement was about, and I learned it was about self-love as much as anything else.”

Dallas-raised filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary has crafted several short films and documentaries which chronicle the imagination and legacy of Black women artists and activists, and she is currently working on an autobiographical feature. Gary was pleasantly forthright when I asked her about the radical themes in her work. “I’m interested in the liberation of Black people and all oppressed people around the globe, so that includes liberation from the various systems that enact violence and harm in our lives,” she said. “There’s all types of work I want to do, and it may not be overtly political, but like WEB DuBois says, all art is political, whether you want it to be or not. Whether it’s overt, or whether it’s very subtle and covert. Because we’re talking about life—because we’re talking about people, ultimately we’re going to be talking power.”

Gary’s films are as radical in form as they are in subject matter. The director/editor juxtaposes archival and contemporary footage to draw a continuum between the radical actions of the past and the comforts and struggles of the present. Her film “The Giverny Document” utilizes a Nina Simone performance, alludes to Claude Monet, and presents direct footage from the night of Philando Castile’s murder to make a mesmerizing collage. “[The] reason why I’m doing that is to really expand people’s ideas and perceptions around reality and what can be, what is possible,” Gary says. “That’s the whole point of the work, it’s a kind of radical reimagining of what reality can be. So, in some ways people are watching a movie, but in other ways, maybe they are reimagining what the world can look like, what these systems that we spoke about earlier, what can replace these systems that cause so much harm.”