Started by Speller Street Films and The Luminal Theater, BLK Docs is an initiative to help build an authentic documentary film culture within the African-American community through film screenings, webinars, and more interactive film events.
Using rare photographs, original research, and testimonies from the descendants of the victims, this documentary directed by Speller Street Films founder Christopher Everett, reveals how the massacre became the springboard for white supremacy and Jim Crow throughout the American South, and how the devastation still affects Black American life to this day.
BLK Docs will also host two Q&A sessions: on June 25th, Everett will share how “Wilmington on Fire” came to be, and how this 100 year old story still impacts everyday life in Wilmington and beyond (8pm), and on June 30th with film interviewee Larry Reni Thomas (7pm).
As producers, programmers, and budding archivists of Black cinema, Everett, and The Luminal Theater’s founder Curtis Caesar John started BLK Docs after being increasingly frustrated by being unable to find enough contemporary documentaries by Black filmmakers to showcase.
The July edition of BLK Docs will feature Shaun Mathis’ 2017 documentary “Miles In The Life,” a chronicle of Atlanta limousine driver Jabari Hayes, who trafficked large quantities of cocaine across the country for the then largest African-American drug organization in the southeast known as the Black Mafia Family.
