CHICAGO — A weeklong festival showcasing films that chronicle the Black experience across the diaspora will return to Chicago this November.
The Black Harvest Film Festival will celebrate its 31st year Friday through Nov. 16 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. Individual tickets and movie passes are available for purchase here.
The festival will open with six digital shorts and the presentation of The Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Black Harvest Film Festival Prize — a $1,000 award for a short film and a $2,500 prize for a feature film. Tickets for opening night are available here.
The Black Harvest Film Festival is dedicated to “showcasing the expanse of Black brilliance all over the world and across time,” said festival curator jada-amina. A local artist, writer and graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, jada-amina received the curating torch from those before her just three years ago, she said. She grew up attending the festival.
Black Harvest merges timely and historic narratives by giving a platform to emerging talent and displaying repertory films that have been restored, jada-amina said. The festival has hosted both local and world premieres over its three-decades-plus history.
Films screening this year include “Black Girl,” a 1972 film by Ossie Davis exploring the life of a young dancer and the generational stories of the women around her, and “Seeds,” a 2025 documentary by Brittany Shyne about the history and current lives of Black farmers in the South.
The festival’s “Hauntologies” program will spotlight horror and speculative cinema, while a “Mystery Movie Monday” event will include a secret film that won’t be announced until the tape starts rolling.
From “Move Ya Body: The Birth Of House” to two films screening in “Daughters Of DuSable,” selections at the film festival this year are especially centered on highlighting the Chicago experience.
“Move Ya Body: The Birth of House” chronicles the prolific rise — and resulting domination — of house music locally and beyond. “The Restore Fellowship Documentary” by Ken Williams Jr. follows five formerly incarcerated men as they reflect on the impact of the prison system while traveling in Benin.
“Daughters of DuSable,” a two-feature special, celebrates Chicago’s Black women organizers whose told and untold stories helped drive progress and shift the narratives for their communities.
This year was about bringing it home, jada-amina said.
“Chicago is so special,” jada-amina said. “We’re in the middle of America, and we’re doing it big in ways that other festivals just don’t.”
When curating films for the festival, jada-amina likes to select a repertoire of films that are in dialogue with one another, she said. The festival received over 500 film submissions this year, ranging from features and documentaries to shorts, Harvey said.
“A funny part of being a festival programmer and leading that is disqualifying a host of films that have nothing to do with Black Harvest,” jada-amina said. “Then there are the hundreds of films that are about Black people and the legacy of their lives globally. The process is super fun for me because you get to tap into people’s brains and see films, sometimes for the first time ever, which is awesome.”
The festival’s selections are “cutting edge” and something you might not see at another festival, she said. As the political landscape has shifted over the past three years in her role, Harvey chooses films that are in response to the changing tides.
In aiming to celebrate the Black experience, the Black Harvest Film Festival doesn’t platform films that are “trauma dumps and ideas of Black folks as this monolithic race of people that are scratching and surviving,” jada-amina said. That doesn’t mean films won’t touch on the struggles protagonists face — that’s part of the human experience — but a hallmark of the festival is joy.
“People want to feel connected,” jada-amina said. “People cry at the movies because they see themselves in these stories, so I’m drawn to stories that breathe life into our stakeholders, community members and filmmakers.”
One film Harvey is thrilled to platform at the festival is “BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions,” by Kahlil Joseph, she said. Joseph’s work began as a video installation in 2019 and grew into a feature film that melds documentary storytelling with fiction to tell the story of Black life over hundreds of years.
jada-amina will be in conversation with Joseph and presenting him with the Black Harvest Film Festival’s Visionary Award Nov. 9. Tickets are available here.
“The film is truly one critical piece of media that will certainly be regarded as that throughout time,” she said.
For jada-amina, her love for storytelling begins with her grandparents and their ancestors who passed on the tradition of oral storytelling, she said.
“I’m really proud to always curate from the educational experience that I had at the School of the Art Institute — but also, my grandparents picked cotton,” she said. “The ancestral memory that keeps us alive is telling stories. It is understanding the importance of legacy building through storytelling and understanding that it is resistance.”
As the popularity of streaming movies from home continues to dominate the industry, jada-amina is thankful for the film lovers who continue to attend the festival in person, she said. The films playing at the festival this year will make leaving your home worth the time and dedication, she added.
“Many times films do end up going to distribution a year later, and that’s wonderful,” jada-amina said. “But for those of us who are looking for something a little different and looking to engage in a different way, the festival provides a space for that.”
More detailed information on the dozens of films screening at this year’s Black Harvest Festival is available on the fest website.
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