The 9th annual BronzeLens Film Festival ended triumphantly Sunday with screenings to the very end. Over the course of five days, movie fans, celebrities and personalities converged on the Marriott Marquis and other venues in Atlanta.
Filmmakers far and wide came out to show support as well as have their productions screened to live audiences.
The films featured a wide array of movies about different cultures, viewpoints and ethnicities, highlighting a widespread diaspora of global filmmakers.
BronzeLens Film Festival opens in Atlanta
With hundreds of actors, producers and filmmakers in tow, the film festival’s big winner was “Jinn,” which won the Best Film Award at the event. “Jinn” is a Muslim-centered movie about a teen who rebels against her mother’s newfound faith of Islam.
“This is a story that was many years in the making,” “Jinn” filmmaker Nijla Mu’min told the crowd. “I grew up in a very vibrant African-American Muslim community in Oakland. My father and my mother really helped to immerse me in that community and I never saw textured, complicated images of those people in media.”
On the festival’s final night, another film, “United Skates” made its Atlanta premiere to rousing applause and fanfare. The film was produced and directed by Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown. Winkler told the crowd that during the four+ years it took to produce the documentary, she learned the secret sauce of stopping some of the nation’s top roller rinks from closing: Zoning.
Winkler said when she originally delved into doing interviews for the documentary she discovered that was culturally important to Americans, but especially to African-Americans. “When I saw what the narrative was, I didn’t want to do the film. I thought it was a great story, a story that needed to be told, but not by me, by an African-American.”
She said the skating community pushed her to continue the project, which turned into a labor of love and enamored her to people all around the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ExXMi06co
Another fan favorite was “Canal Street,” which features an all-star cast including Mekhi Phifer, Mykelti Williamson, Lance Reddick and Jon Seda.
The film is a modern-day thriller telling the story of a teen, Kholi Styles, trying to get by in an unwelcoming new world. After the mysterious death of a classmate, all eyes fall on Kholi, the new kid at his high school. It’s up to his father, Jackie Styles, an up-and-coming lawyer from the slums of Chicago, to defend his son in court and battle an outraged public before time runs out. Jackie fights to keep his faith and prove his son is not the monster the world has made him out to be.
https://vimeo.com/223838829
There were several top-notch black films screening at this year’s event.
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