Imagining Liberation Through Film: Cultural Power at BlackStar Film Festival 2024
At the Center for Cultural Power, our mission is to use culture as a catalyst for political change. We’re committed to fostering creative works that inspire us to dream beyond the constraints of our current systems. Film, with its capacity to visualize new perspectives or past modes of resistance, plays a critical role in igniting cultural and social transformation. It’s an artistic medium that stretches the boundaries of our imaginations, illuminates paths for collective resistance, and provokes the cultural shifts necessary for a more liberated future. This is why film festivals like BlackStar are crucial in our world. For the second year in a row, the Center for Cultural Power was proud to support BlackStar as the official sponsor of the Best Director of Climate Storytelling award.
It’s a pleasure to be in community with a unique festival like BlackStar, which not only showcases stunning contemporary filmmaking, but also uses its platform to explicitly support BIPOC artists. As filmmaker Meena Nanji noted in a panel discussion following her poignant film about Kenyan revolutionary Mau-Mau elders and descendants: Our Land, Our Freedom: BlackStar is one of the few festivals that stands unabashedly in solidarity with a Free Palestine.
At this year’s BlackStar Director’s Brunch, Cultural Power’s Director of Campaigns and Engagement, Krystle Edwards, presented the award to the remarkable Indigenous filmmaking team Ivan MacDonald & Ivy MacDonald, along with their collaborator Daniel Glick, for their breathtaking film Bring Them Home. Narrated with the grounding and alluring voice of Lily Gladstone, the film follows an Indigenous community of Blackfoot people in their mission to reintroduce the wild buffalo to their ancestral lands. The reintroduction project reflects many of the themes and issue areas of our organization including land restoration, culture bearing, and healing a relationship to nature ruptured by settler colonialism and racial capitalism.
Ivan and Ivy MacDonald are proud enrolled members of the Blackfeet Tribe of Northern Montana, deeply connected to their community's struggles and triumphs. Ivan holds a master's degree in social work and has extensive experience working with Indigenous communities in various settings, including prisons, mental health, and activist spaces. His work has also appeared on ESPN and with the ACLU, and he was a Fourth World Media Fellow for Tracey Rector's Indigenous filmmaker program. Ivy graduated from the University of Montana with a BFA in Digital Filmmaking in 2017. Together, they have dedicated the past two and a half years to documenting stories across Montana, giving voice to communities affected by the MMIW crisis and building trust with families eager to share their stories. Daniel Glick, a multimedia storyteller with an extensive journalistic background, was integral to the artful amplification of the Blackfeet Tribe’s story.
The festival’s programming continued to resonate with climate and gender themes central to our work, reminding us of last year’s BlackStar screening of our short film, The Aunties, co-produced with former Cultural Power staff Jeannine and Charlyn Kayembe-Oro, and our 2023 Best Director of Climate Storytelling award winner, Mirasol, by Annalise Lockheart.
On Thursday evening, the world premiere of Dreams in Nightmares offered a visually stunning narrative of Black, queer community—showcasing the journey of chosen family navigating systems of oppression to find safety and joy. This theme was further explored on Friday with films like Family Tree, which highlighted the resistance of two Black families as they battle development, climate crises, and family dynamics to protect the lush forests of North Carolina.
BlackStar 2024 was a celebration of autonomy and the choices we make in our lives—whether in our relationships, our engagement with societal systems, or our modes of resistance. As a sublimely Black and Indigenous creative space, Blackstar sets a new standard for how art can be cultivated to envision and shape a more just future. It was a weekend that captured and inspired the divine, life-giving expressions of gender, protection, and connection to the natural world.
