PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Classics of Black cinema, as well as movies that flew under the radar are on display this weekend at the Philadelphia Film Center in Center City.
The five-night Black Cinema Weekend series kicked off Black History Month on Thursday with a screening of Zeinabu Irene Davis’ 1991 romantic drama “A Powerful Thang.” The Philadelphia Film Society, which operates the Film Center, followed that on Friday with that same year’s seminal coming-of-age story “Boyz N the Hood.”
The Film Center also has a series of events scheduled over the weekend before the films, including everything from a celebration of Black women filmmakers to a family-fun trivia night. Black Cinema Weekend runs through Sunday.
“What I love about film in particular is that it has a power to spark conversation, show you something, and have you grapple with it as a community,” said Joshua Campbell, director of education for PFS. He worked alongside education and programming coordinator Yace Sula to assemble the lineup.
“What I love about this program specifically, it’s a plethora of varying narratives of Blackness that aren’t necessarily explicitly about Blackness,” shared Sula. “It’s just about being a person in this world and navigating the things you navigate in life, but you can’t separate Blackness from that.”
The selected films also honor the achievements of their creators, like “Boyz N the Hood” director John Singleton. Singleton made the movie right out of film school, and received Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director — becoming not only the youngest, but also the first Black director to be nominated.
“The best way to honor the likes of a John Singleton is to continue that work, and to continue uplifting Black filmmakers and filmmakers of color, and giving them the opportunity to continue the work that he did,” said Sula.
The movie’s themes of gun violence, police brutality and family are just a few that some of the other films this weekend will grapple with while showcasing the complexity of Blackness. “It’s asking us, in this moment, ‘Have we really grown, have we really learned, have we really evolved if this thing is still happening?’” said Campbell.
Several dozen Black creatives gathered Friday evening for a cocktail hour before entering the theater to see the Singleton classic. Jae Rich was the mind behind the cocktails, and she has a whole slate of them to go with every movie being shown across Black Cinema Weekend.
“We called it Sweet Cinematics, and that was infusing flavor with film, and I decided to theme all of the drinks around the movies,” said Rich, who called Friday’s drink “Concrete Jungle.”
“We came up with these amazing ideas,” she added. “‘How can we help people experience all of the amazing things that the Philadelphia Film Society has?’ Just movies, but they also have an amazing bar experience here.”
Six other movies will be showcased this weekend, including “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” credited with kicking off the Blaxplotation wave of the ‘70s, and 1982’s “Losing Ground,” the first movie directed by a Black woman since the 1920s.
Also on the schedule are the supernatural drama “Eve’s Bayou,” starring Samuel L. Jackson, and the boxing biopic “Big George Foreman.”