PHILADELPHIA, PA —BlackStar Film Festival is proud to present Revival! an audio-visual meditation, a three-week series of live-streamed virtual dance parties and live performances that celebrate the visual and sonic culture of shared Black spiritual experiences. The special series, part of BlackStar’s efforts to provide engaging programming that extends beyond the annual film festival, will begin next Sunday June, 14 at 2pm EST, streaming for free on BlackStar’s Twitch channel. 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. Revival! invites longtime friends and frequent collaborators DJs Lil’ Dave, Oluwafemi, and Rashid Zakat to take turns creating live sound mixes over moving image backdrops. Each accomplished cultural workers in their own right, Lil’ Dave, Oluwafemi and Rashid Zakat are deeply invested and versed in crafting stories across genre. David ‘Lil’ Dave’ Adams is the producer and host of the podcast Excellent Reception, Rashid Zakat is a prolific portraitist and cinematographer, and Oluwafemi’s trajectory as a visual artist and illustrator situate them perfectly as a unit for this kind of cross-disciplinary, experimental work. Funding for this series is provided in part by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. Full schedule is below: Episode 1: Rashid Zakat June 14, 2020, 2pm EDT Episode 2: Lil’ Dave June 21, 2020, 2pm EDT Episode 3: Oluwafemi June 28, 2020, 2pm EDT You can RSVP for each episode in the series on Eventbrite here. More information is available at blackstarfest.org/revival About BlackStar Film Festival The BlackStar Film Festival is an annual celebration of the visual and storytelling traditions of the African diaspora and global communities of color — showcasing films by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people from around the world.
