Black Harvest Film Festival Celebrates 30 Years

School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center
School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center

Black Harvest Film Festival Celebrates 30 Years

By Tia Carol Jones

The Black Harvest Film Festival is celebrating a milestone and continuing its legacy of showcasing films from the African diaspora that highlight the African American and Black experience.

The Black Harvest Film Festival was founded in 1994. Sergio Mims was one of the festival’s co-founders. Mims passed in 2022 and to celebrate his dedication to the festival, the Sergio Mims Fund for Black Excellence in Filmmaking was established as a way to give a platform to a new generation of Black filmmakers.

The Black Harvest Film Festival will take place from Nov. 8th-21st at the Gene Siskel Film Center, which is located at 164 N. State St.

This is the second year that Jada-Amina Harvey is taking on the role of lead curator and Nick Leffal is the festival coordinator. Jada-Amina said the first year went really well and she is really excited to serve as curator for this year’s film festival. In the second year, she doesn’t have the same jitters she had last year.

“This year is our 30th, its going to be bigger than ever. There’s a lot of excitement around the 30th year and a lot of excitement around our programming,” Jada-Amina said.

Jada-Amina said they are thinking about the Black Harvest Film Festival as a living, breathing entity that is entering a new decade. There will be programming that speaks to millennial living and the experience of people who are heading into their 30s or are well into their 30s.

For this year’s film festival, Jada-Amina is taking in the feedback from previous years into consideration. One thing they did hear was that people wanted more. While in previous years, the film festival only showed on one screen at the center, the film festival will be shown on both screens at the center.  That way, if people are coming to the film center during the Black Harvest Film Festival, they are coming to see films that are in the festival.

For the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family, the  Black Harvest Film Festival Prize is given to the best short film and the best feature film. Best short film will receive $1,000 and best feature film will receive $2,500. The winner of the Sergio Mims Award for Black Excellence in Filmmaking will receive $5,000. That award will go to a local filmmaker whose work is featured in the film festival. The judges for the film festival are Filmmaker Julie Dash, Film Critic Robert Daniels and Filmmaker Raven Jackson.

“We’re very blessed to have such wonderful luminaries at our disposal,” Jada-Amina said.

For Jada-Amina when it comes to curating the film festival, form matters, but feeling matters even more. She looks at how a film makes a person feel, how is the person bearing witness to the stories that are on the screen. She is looking for images that exalt the Black experience as one where Black folks deserve and are owed freedom.

“I’m looking for films and images that do just that; really unpack some of the images that have been imposed upon us and really speak to the unique stories and characters that are being told,” Jada-Amina said.

Jada-Amina and the team at the Black Film Festival are really excited about films that are narrative and have a documentary quality, that are experimental and the reparatory films. They are also excited to platform local filmmakers and all filmmakers from across the African Diaspora.

Jada-Amina said platforming Chicago talent at the film festival gives them a sense of pride in being able to say Chicago filmmakers showed at Black Harvest first.

“We love being a hometown staple, with global resonance. I think that was Sergio’s vision and it continues to be our compass as we continue to do the work,” Jada-Amina said.

The lineup for the Black Harvest Film Festival will be announced on Oct. 11th. For tickets, visit www.siskelfilmcenter.org/blackharvest.

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