Argyle Rebel Films, a minority-led North Carolina film production company, will be hosting the second annual Chapel Hill Black Film Festival this weekend at the Varsity Theatre on Franklin Street; the two-day event will honor Black culture and storytellers in the community, as well as feature panels with local filmmakers.
On Friday, the opening night of the festival, the festival will recognize the 2023 Carolina Black Pioneer Scholarship Presentation and Film award winners Jailyn Neville and Taliajah Vann, both students at the UNC-Chapel Hill. Neville and Vann’s film will premiere at the event.
“We’re so excited. Our film is going to be showing on Friday night, the 10th, and we’re really excited for that,” Vann said in an interview with local radio station WCHL. “Broadly, our film is about grief and personhood–and in all the work that we do as filmmakers, we really try to bring experiences to people and tell their stories in a way that feels authentic.”
Friday will also feature Raleigh filmmaker Evan Kidd’s Panda Bear It, a movie about a struggling rapper who finds a panda bear by his side after the unexpected death of his girlfriend, followed by a panel with Kidd and the film’s cast.
On Saturday, the festivities will start with viewings of two documentaries. The first, The Big Payback, directed by Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow, examines Evanston, Illinois Alderwoman Robin Rue Simmons’s fight to remedy the legacy of “redlining” and slavery through a local reparations program. The documentary will be followed by a panel about reparations moderated by Chris Everett, a Durham-based filmmaker and producer.
The second documentary is Hazing, directed and produced by Columbia University professor Byron Hunt and North Carolina State professor Natalie Brown. Hazing takes a look at the practice of hazing in fraternities and sororities across the United States. The screening will be followed by a panel featuring students in the Greek system at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The festival will conclude with Mike Wiley’s One Noble Journey, a dramatic performance that tells the story of Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped from slavery by shipping himself in a box to Philadelphia.
Last year, Wiley performed at Chapel Hill High School as part of Black History Month, telling the story of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
