BOGO! Black Star Presents 2-for-1 Ticket Pack: Click Here For Details

Are we celebrating the Valentines of Tomorrow? Yes we are! No candy hearts or roses needed, we’re providing an alternative to show your love for unbound artists, storytellers and magic-makers in our community.  Jump into the unknown and join us for a completely unique, unexpected and deeply moving experience this weekend.

Doors 4:30 p.m.; Short Films begin at 5 p.m. Revival! performance starts at 6:15 p.m. Tickets are $25.
Click here to learn about accessibility at the Tomorrow Theater.

PAM CUT is thrilled to partner with Philly’s most vibrant cultural space and festival BlackStar to present new work, including Revival!, a live audio-visual meditation that celebrates the visual and sonic culture of shared Black spiritual experiences. Philly-based guest artist Rashid Zakat will spin music & videos live on stage: activating a relationship between the audience and the work which invites joy, ecstasy and humor to invoke a transcendental social experience. Begins at 6:15 p.m., performance is 120 min long. 

Prior to the Revival! performance, BlackStar will share a series of short films curated for the BlackStar Film Festival. Begins at 5 p.m., series is 55 min long. 

BlackStar Projects books & publications will be available for sale in the lobby.

Revival!

Revival! is an attempt to reimagine and practice what collective joy and resilience looks like in times of crisis. Subtly drawing upon José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of ecstasy as “an invitation, a call to a then-and-there, a not-yet-here… a collective potentiality,” Revival! treats ecstasy not only as a corrective balm to injury but a world-making claim to the right of life, imagination, and joyful expression, an especially critical response to our current moment. 

The audio-visual meditation offers the opportunity to step out of the here-and-now and virtually tap into what is not-yet-here. Using aural- and image-based motifs from the African diaspora the artists reverberate the intimacies and pleasures of shared spiritual experiences from across time and place.

Rashid Zakat
Rashid Zakat is a filmmaker and artist based in Philadelphia. He uses video, photography, design, audio and the web to encourage people to find as much beauty, joy and wonder as possible. Professionally Rashid has a 15 year long career as a director and cinematographer for non-fiction, experimental films and music videos. He has done work for India.Arie, Carmelo Anthony, Black Thought, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, BlackStar Film Festival, Soul Train, Topic, WHYY, Philadelphia Contemporary, Mural Arts, & BET to name a few. His personal work includes short documentary, iPhone and traditional portrait projects, visual mixtapes, digital publications, video installations, open mics & dance parties that experiment with visuals.

Short Film Program

The Aunties
2023. Directed by Charlyn Griffith-Oro and Jeannine Kayembe-Oro. Runtime: 6 minutes.

A short format climate documentary based on the lives of Black farmers Paulette Greene, and Donna Dear, and the legacies of Harriet Tubman and Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms. The intention of this film is to inspire QTBIPOC communities in the climate justice field to continue their work and to bring those witnessing on the sidelines into climate action and activism. We see our protagonists in active stewardship of land that they have grown alongside for almost 30 years. The film touches on themes of race and gender, offering viewers the opportunity to consider connecting legacies of enslavement, freedom and Black eldership.

 

Freshwater
2022. Directed by dream hampton. Runtime: 10 minutes.

Freshwater is a portrait of remembrance, of flooded Midwestern basements and maintaining connection in the wake of ongoing displacement, abandonment and climate catastrophe. This film was meant to be small in every way–lingering shots that seem like photographs until the wind blows a leaf or a raindrop disturbs a puddle. Similarly the intentionally small production was meant to be healing. It was a retreat into a cadre of like-minded community of Detroit artists after doing work on three projects that were at major studios. I made Freshwater to remind myself I’m an artist, but also to reinforce the organizing principle about the power of small, local organizing.

dream hampton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer from Detroit. For two decades her essays and cultural criticism helped shape a generation. Her most recent works include the award winning short film “Freshwater” (NYT OpDocs/PBS, 2023) and “Ladies First” (Netflix, 2023). Selected works include “Treasure“ (Frameline, 2015), “Finding Justice” (BET, 2019), “It’s A Hard Truth Ain’t It” (HBO, 2019) and the Emmy nominated “Surviving R. Kelly” (Netflix, 2019), which broke ratings records and earned her a Peabody Award. In 2019, hampton was named one of TIME 100’s most influential people in the world.

 

The Wind Carries Us Home
2022. Directed by Udval Altangerel. Runtime: 11 minutes.

Through rituals of birth and death, the filmmaker and her family reconnect with their ancestral land in the Gobi Desert.

Udval Altangerel is a Mongolian filmmaker who explores the themes of personal and national histories, language, and (home)land.

 

In Vitro
2020. Directed by Søren Lind and Larissa Sansour. Runtime: 28 minutes.

In Vitro is a 2-channel Arabic-language sci-fi short filmed in black and white. It is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above. In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, 70-year-old Alia, played by Hiam Abbass, is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia, played by Maisa Abd Elhadi, comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive cloning program and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild. The talk between the two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and nostalgia. Central to their discussion is the intricate relationship between past, present and future, with the Bethlehem setting providing a narratively, politically and symbolically charged backdrop.

Larissa Sansour was born in 1973 in East Jerusalem, Palestine, and studied fine arts in London, New York and Copenhagen. Central to her work is the dialectics between myth, fiction and historical narrative. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Sansour’s work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. In 2019, she represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. In 2020, she was the shared recipient of the prestigious Jarman Award (UK). She has shown her work at Tate Modern, MoMA and Centre Pompidou. Recent solo exhibitions include Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, KINDL in Berlin, Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark, Gifu Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan and EMST in Athens. Sansour currently lives and works in London, UK.

 

Soren Lind (b. 1970) is a Danish author, artist, director and scriptwriter. With a background in philosophy, Lind wrote books on mind, language and understanding before turning to art, film and fiction. He has published novels, shorts story collections. His children’s books are translated into several languages.

Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide. His work was shown at the Danish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennial. Other recent venues and festivals include the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, Kunsten in Denmark, KINDL in Berlin, International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL) and BFI London Film Festival (UK). He lives and works in London.

BlackStar

BlackStar creates the spaces and resources needed to uplift the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists working outside of the confines of genre. We do this by producing year-round programs including film screenings, exhibitions, an annual film festival, a filmmaker seminar, a film production lab, and a journal of visual culture. These programs provide artists opportunities for viable strategies for collaborations with other artists, audiences, funders, and distributors.