Harvest feast

Black Harvest reaps the best of black filmmaking, local and international.

The 14th annual edition of the Black Harvest Film Festival offers a bumper crop of black cinema—a mix of local and national, high budget and low, documentary and fiction. Cofounder and coprogrammer Sergio Mims describes it as Black Harvest’s strongest lineup in years—a function not just of the festival’s growing profile but of stronger submissions.

“Any festival is only as good as the films that are out there at any particular time, particularly when it comes to black independent cinema,” Mims says. “Filmmakers have really stepped up their games.”

The festival has also grown to a point where distributors seek it out. Black Harvest was selected for an advance showing of the first episode of HBO’s documentary series The Black List, which consists of interviews with a wide array of influential African-Americans. (The screening will feature a discussion with former New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell, who collaborated on the project.) Black Harvest will also present a sneak preview of the Katrina documentary Trouble the Water, a critical favorite at Sundance.

That’s just scratching the surface. Culled from a combination of other festivals, word of mouth, research and hunting filmmakers down—which can be surprisingly difficult, Mims says—the films are selected over a yearlong process. The festival’s mission, according to Mims, is to show a “wide range” of black culture from across the world. “The filmmaker could be black, could be white, could be anybody,” he says. “We don’t care. As long as the subject matter fits what our goal is—to present independent black cinema.

“People think of black movies, they think of, unfortunately, Tyler Perry,” Mims says. “He just happens to be the new kid on the block, and he’ll fade soon—I guarantee you that. There have been black filmmakers since the silent era, literally.… There’s always been a history of black independent cinema, and their whole goal was to show a reality of black life and black culture—the one that you’re not seeing reflected in Hollywood movies.”

Multiculturalism hangs over the festival, whose films span from New Orleans to Tanzania. One of the more absorbing entries, Heart of Fire, is a German film about a young girl’s experiences during the Eritrean-Ethiopian civil war.

But the big story this year is the work of Chicago-area filmmakers, who Mims says have made a remarkable step forward after years of “subpar work.” “If you’re a filmmaker in L.A., everybody is trying to do their best work,” he explains. “Here in Chicago, there wasn’t much competition.” But that’s not the case anymore. While five or six years ago, Mims estimates, the only locally made films in the festival were shorts, this year there are seven features in the festival billed as having a Chicago connection.

Were any films given a pass because of their locality? The Opposite of Life, the stark story of a law student and a rape victim both considering abortions, has a sound mix that might be described as muffled. But in the case of that film, topicality was more important than the local connection. “Forget black or white, I can’t think of any filmmaker who actually deals with this topic,” Mims says. “And for a black filmmaker dealing with this issue in the black community—which is an issue, but it’s something that is rarely discussed…we said, okay, we can, in a way, forgive the technical shortcomings because of the subject matter and sincerity of the filmmaker.”

Mims also points to locally made films with a strong visual sensibility, such as The Gilded Six-Bits, a Gary, Indiana–produced adaptation of a Zora Neale Hurston short story that at times has an almost Malickian lyricism. “Chicago, since we’re a Midwestern city, we’re still a little behind the game when it comes to New York and L.A.,” Mims says. “I know people don’t want to hear that, but it’s, like, true.”

There are other, nonlocal films—such as the documentary Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome and A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy (a confidently experimental film that uses six sexual encounters as jumping points for exploring broader facets of relationships) as indicative of the kind of bold work he’s encountering now, more so than when the festival started.

“At first, people were just making any kind of movie just to make a movie,” he says. “Then for a while—for a long while—people were basically making copies of what was successful.… Now they’re generally trying to make movies which say something and say something to them.”

The Black Harvest Film Festival runs Friday through August 28 at the Gene Siskel Film Center .

---