WILMINGTON — For more than two decades, the North Carolina Black Film Festival (NCBFF) has focused on celebrating Black cinema as artists from across the country gather in Wilmington.
This year the festival turns 22 and kicks off Thursday, April 9, at 6 p.m.
“It’s just been a great tenure to be able to run the festival for this period of time and be able to elevate it and enhance what they started so many years ago,” Director Charlon Everett told Port City Daily Wednesday.
This year’s festival will host four days of events, with screenings and awards at various locations, including Wilson Center, Jengo’s Playhouse, Boseman’s Shoes and the Cameron Art Museum. 30 films have been chosen out of more than 75 submissions. They are screened in blocks, showcasing documentaries, shorts and features.
“The focus this year has been on animation,” Everett said. “We’ve always had an animation category, but we don’t always get animation, so it’s been several years since we’ve highlighted any animation projects.”
Also this year, the festival will present the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award in Animation to Bruce W. Smith, Oscar-winning film producer and animator who has three decades of experience in the business. His works include “Hair Love,” winner of 2020’s Best Animated Short Film Oscar, along with “The Proud Family,” “The Princess and the Frog,” “Da Boom Crew” and more, some of which will be screened at the festival.
Everett said his 30 years in the profession made him suitable for the award, to be presented Saturday, Apr. 12 at Jengo’s Playhouse, (815 Princess Street). Smith, who has worked for Walt Disney Animation Studios since the mid-’90s, will also host a fireside chat so audience members can ask questions.
Family-friendly films will screen at Jengo’s Playhouse on Saturday, too, and a Black Girls Film Camp (BGFC) workshop will be hosted at Vue21North. BGFC’s mission is to close the representation gap of Black girls in media by giving the younger generation an opportunity to learn and grow within storytelling and film.
“We were at full capacity last year when the cohort came,” Everett said. “They came with their families, their parents, their grandparents, their aunts or uncles. It was a full house.”
The BGFC Cinematography 101 workshop will be hosted at Vue21North at 11 a.m. Saturday, and students will learn from cinematographer Isiah Donté Lee, who will later be honored with the 2025 Visionary Award in Cinematography Award on Sunday. A former student at Wilmington School of the Arts, Lee excelled in cinematography from a young age, taking off after working on Wilmington on Fire, a 2015 documentary about the Wilmington Massacre of 1898.
“He’s done such incredible cinematography work,” Everett said.
Following Family Cinema and BGFC, Jengo’s Playhouse will screen “Our Movement Starts Here,” directed by John Rash and Melanie Ho, at 3 p.m.
The documentary explores topics surrounding environmental racism and activism, diving into a rural North Carolina community that inspired an environmental justice movement in 1982. Located in the town of Afton, roughly 45 miles north of Raleigh, a protest sparked after loads of chemicals were being dumped in the predominantly African-American community.
“That’s a piece that I’m looking forward to bringing to the community, hopefully having some discussion around it because I think we all can relate, even though it’s not here in Wilmington,” Everett said.
The film festival closes out on Sunday, with a 2 p.m. screening of “Minnie Evans: Draw or Die.” The documentary explores the life of Wilmington artist Minnie Evans, diving into her artistry and faith as an African-American artist during the early 20th century. Some of Evan’s artwork will be displayed at Cameron Art Museum along with the screening.
Evans is revered locally, born in 1892 in Long Creek in Pender County, though her lineage traces back to Trinidad. She eventually lived and worked as a gatekeeper the Airlie Estate — now Airlie Gardens — and was inspired by her surroundings to paint. Self-taught in her 40s, Evans’ faith steered many psychic visions she eventually captured.
“A lot of people admire and respect the work of Minnie Evans,” Everett said, “and some of the local filmmakers have worked on that particular project, so there’s a lot of interest there.”
Linda Royal and Annette Freeman, both Wilmington locals, along with Olympia Stone of Chapel Hill, worked together on the production of the film. Royal, whose films have won multiple U.S. and international film festivals, was moved by the 1984 documentary “The Angel That Stands By Me,” as she watched it in CAM in 2018. The 25-minute long doc detailed Evan’s life through interviews and scenes recorded shortly before her death in 1987.
Royal was inspired to create a longer film where she could bring greater awareness to Evans’ life and art.
NCBFF will also announce award-winners on Sunday for Best Short, Best Feature, Best Documentary, Best Short Docs, and Best Emerging Films (student films).
The event kicks off on Thursday with a CineMixer hosted at CFCC’s Wilson Center and there will be live music from Village Minded, guests can enjoy hor d’oeuvres, beer and wine and mingle before the screening of the two opening films, APR-African Rhythms Power, directed by Nelson Shongo Leoni, and The Jazz Photographer, directed by Cedric D. Ingram.
Tickets to individual events and weekend passes are available here.
