Really looking forward to Toronto International Film Festival’s BLACK STAR! A 6-week retrospective honoring groundbreaking Black film, Black Star will explore over a 100 years of Black filmmakers, actors and iconic films.
On Friday November 3, Black Star opens with a boom bap tribute to Toronto, featuring Love, Sex and Eating the Bones (by director Sudz Sutherland) with a trio of T.O. Hip Hop Classics spotlighting music on video. Can’t wait to see THE TRILOGY: 3MCz featuring Motion, Tara Chase and Apani B. Fly (Blacklist), directed by award-winning director Alison Duke, screened alongside Northern Touch (Rascalz, Kardinal Offishall, Thrust, Choclair, Chekmate, Little X) and Started from the Bottom (Drake, Director X)!
Being a movie fiend, definitely about to overdose of many film favourites, and discover some rare classics!
“TIFF’s Fall ’17 season includes Black Star (running November 3 to December 22), a groundbreaking programme, in collaboration with the British Film Institute. (BFI Black Star opened at the BFI Southbank in October 2016.) TIFF is honoured to have programmer Ashley Clark, the curator of the series, to introduce the first weekend of screenings. It celebrates the unique icons of Black stardom like Eddie Murphy, Louise Beavers (who transcended the harmful “Mammy” stereotype with her vulnerable, Oscar-nominated performance in 1934’s Imitation of Life), and vaudevillian Bert Williams (who appears in the 1913 film Lime Kiln Club Field Day, the earliest documented film with an all-black principal cast). Guest speakers will frame the discussions: writer and Cleo editor Lydia Ogwang will introduce Haile Gerima’s stark 1975 film Bush Mama, and rapper Kardinal Offishall will speak on John Landis’ 1988 culture-clash comedy Coming to America, among other guest appearances. The sidebar programme Black Star Canada celebrates Black Canadian filmmakers who choose to document their own experiences with screenings that include Stella Meghie’s 2016 intergenerational comedy Jean of the Joneses, Charles Officer’s 2002 lyrical short drama Short Hymn, Silent War, and Clement Virgo’s boundary-breaking 1995 debut Rude.”
Impact Award-winning short film A MAN’S STORY had the great honour of joining films from around the world on the screens of the 
Motion talks about the similarities between James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Jael Ealey Richardson’s The Stone Thrower. (photo\Zahra Siddiqui)
Motion is an award-winning screenwriter, playwright and storyteller. Her work has been screened at the ReelWorld Film Festival and Africa International Film Festival, and staged at Factory Theatre, Theatre Center, bcurrent’s Rock.Paper.Sistaz, Rhubarb Festival’s Black Lives, Black Words and Obsidian’s International Black Playwrights Festival. She is also an alumna of the Canadian Film Center. Motion is our lead facilitator, guiding participants through the process of developing their stories and scripts, and navigating new interactions and opportunities made available through the Intensive.
Rania El Mugammar is a Writer, Arts Educator, Community Organizer and Equity,Anti-Oppression and Inclusion Educator, who will engage with participants in working through difficult questions of representations as they set out to write their scripts and create their arcs.
