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“This year is especially meaningful as we honor the remarkable Lillian Benson, whose career has helped pave the way for so many and whose commitment to mentoring is shaping a new generation of artists.”
— Leslie Fields-Cruz, BPM executive director
Black Public Media will host the 2025 PitchBLACK Forum & Awards program on Wednesday, April 30 and Thursday evening, May 1, at the Apollo Stages at the Victoria in Harlem.
Tameka Kee will once again serve as the PitchBLACK Forum moderator. The Forum’s morning session will feature five documentary film pitches. In the afternoon, six immersive projects will be pitched. Learn more about the works in competition by clicking through the carousel of film and immersive projects below. PitchBLACK Forum is an invitational event. Only those holding registered passes are allowed to attend.
The PitchBLACK Awards program opens with a networking reception followed by a tribute to BPM Trailblazer Lillian E. Benson. As part of the tribute, NPR broadcaster Brittany Luse will interview Benson about her long and distinguished career. The awards program also includes presentation of this year’s Nonso Christian Ugbode Fellowship and announcements of the PitchBLACK Forum winners. A lively afterparty will conclude the festivities. Tickets to the awards program are available for purchase at Ticketmaster.
As part of this year’s PitchBLACK celebration, we’re hosting a BPM Trailblazer Film Retrospective featuring a curated collection of works by Lillian E. Benson (ACE). The selected films will be available for streaming between April 28-May 12. Details about the retrospective will appear in our April newsletter, on our social media channels, and on this webpage.
Witnesses who filmed the deaths of George Floyd, Philando Castile and others step forward to reveal the true cost of going viral while Black: right-wing trolls, police surveillance and exploitative social media platforms that turn their pain into profit.
Co-director, filmmaker, and journalist, Sidney Fussell was a senior reporter at WIRED, The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Business Insider, where he covered everything from artificial intelligence to culture. Fussell is published in The Guardian, EBONY and is featured on NPR, BBC Business World, CBC Radio, and Al Jazeera.
Co-director Jennifer Holness‘ works include: Subjects of Desire, a SXSW Best Documentary nominee; and BLK: An Origin Story, a Canadian Screen Award winner. Industry accolades include: Indiescreen Producer of the Year in 2021, Women in Film and Television Creative Excellence Award in 2022, and The Hollywood Reporter’s 40 Most Influential Women in International Film.
A Better Way: James Lawson, Architect of Nonviolence explores the strategies and tactics Rev. James Lawson created for 1960s civil rights campaigns including the Nashville sit-ins and Memphis sanitation workers strike. It will examine the impact his approach has had on labor movements in Los Angeles, as well as on the young activists Lawson continued to mentor until his passing in 2024.
Producer/Director Karen Hayes holds an M.F.A. in Film/TV Production from UCLA. She is a fellow of Tribeca All Access and AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women. Hayes’ production company, Ubuntu Motion Pictures, is devoted to telling stories that promote equity, justice and healing. Hayes wrote, produced, and directed the short: An Incident In The Life Of A Slave Girl, based on the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs. The film screened at the Pan-African Film Festival among others nationally.
Finding Your Laughter follows Chicago comedian Arlieta Hall, who is learning to use her gifts — stand up comedy and improvisation — as tools for her own mental health and to be a caregiver for her father who is fading from Alzheimer’s disease.
Arlieta Hall is a host, actress, improviser, stand-up comedian, writer, Certified Dementia Communication specialist, and a first-time filmmaker from Chicago. Arlieta also co-starred as Sadie on Showtime’s The CHI series. She is a co-producer of the 2023 Chicago Reader’s Best comedy variety show: My Best Friend is Black. Hall was a caregiver for her father who died from Alzheimer’s disease. She took the power of “Yes, and..” to communicate with him and used their story to make her first feature documentary Finding You Laughter.
Brittany Alsot is a protege of Academy Award short-listed director Mike Attie, who taught her the power of a participant-centered approach to documentary filmmaking. She’s applied this technique to producing, filming, and editing short videos with and about young cancer patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Brittany continues to focus on work that impacts underrepresented communities, making marketing and campaign videos for social justice and arts organizations including Silk Road Cultural Center, Nothing Without a Company, and ONE Northside.
Unfiltered is a coming-of-age, hybrid documentary following 15-year-old Tamia McArthur as she dares to break family cycles and reclaim her youth in a world that forces Black girls to grow up too soon.
Chelsi Bullard is a Memphis-born and Brooklyn-based filmmaker and editor with unwavering desire to restore beauty, well-being and complexity in stories about Black folx. Editing credits include the feature documentary, The Right to Read (Santa Barbara, 2023 and SXSW EDU, 2023), directed by Jenny Mackenzie and executive produced by Reading Rainbow’s LeVar Burton. Producing credits include the feature documentary, Coming Around directed by Sandra Itäinen, which won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at NewFest 2023. Bullard’s directing credits include the short documentaries, On the Ledge (DOC NYC, 2016) and Hidden Wisdom (Socially Relevant Film Festival, 2016).
Jacqueline Olive is an independent filmmaker with nearly 20 years of experience in journalism and film. Her award-winning debut documentary film, Always in Season has received numerous honors including the 2019 Sundance Festival Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency, and Best Writing nomination from IDA Documentary Awards. Always in Season earned the highest ratings for a broadcast on Independent Lens on PBS in 2020.
Olive is currently directing and writing the documentary feature film, The Color of Cola, with Academy Award-nominated director, Stanley Nelson.
Wood Street is the last stop for unhoused brothers, John and LaMonté. They moved there eight years ago after police pushed them from other encampments around Oakland. After a devastating fire, their tight-knit community faces eviction. It’s their goal to stop it.
Caron Creighton is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker who has reported on Israel/Palestine, global African migration patterns, and the Bay Area’s homelessness crisis. Creighton has worked for The Associated Press, AJ+ and The San Francisco Chronicle and has lectured at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She has reported on the struggles faced by Eritrean migrants in Israel, and on West African migration through Latin America. Caron is a 2023/24 SF Film FilmHouse Resident, a 2024 Big Sky Pitch participant and a 2024 BAVC MediaMaker Fellow.
Estevan Padilla is a Mexican-American filmmaker and photographer from Eagle River, Alaska. Padilla is half of LvL Films, a San Francisco based production company focusing on branded content and feature films. He started his career working on major motion pictures for Marvel, Warner Brothers, HBO, and Skydance.He then shifted his focus towards the documentary world to tell stories that align with his values, including projects all around the world in Palestine, Somalia, China, and Cameroon.
As a producer, his first film, The 50, debuted at DOC NYC in 2022 and screened at numerous other festivals. It was acquired by Grasshopper Films and is now available on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. Padilla is currently an SFFILM supported filmmaker and Ranin Fellow in development of his debut feature.
Building on the success of Aya’s Rhythmic Wave (Part I) at UCLA, Part II is a 30-minute live interactive performance blending Afrofuturism, immersive dance, and AI-generated movement in a three-wall projected space. As the second act of a three-part series, AI-dancers, trained on the Akwa Ibom dance archive, remix movements in real time, responding to Aya and audience participation captured through microphones. Attendees receive personalized name cards and a zine, deepening engagement with the narrative.
Faith ‘Aya’ Umoh is a new media artist, researcher, and creative technologist, exploring the intersections of human movement, AI, and speculative ecosystems through Creative Aya, her studio dedicated to bridging organic and digital worlds. Her work merges traditional African dance, machine learning, and immersive technology to create interactive experiences that reimagine cultural storytelling. A recipient of the Stanford BlackAir Grant, Aya developed a co-creative AI system generating speculative visual narratives inspired by literature and music, which showcased at Miami Art Basel in 2024 with an interactive dome experience.
Bed of Roses combines video, oral histories, and AR to examine Jamaican immigrants’ complex experiences. Viewers watch a festive holiday greeting video loop, then use AR to uncover deeper, more somber narratives. The work challenges surface-level portrayals of the ‘American Dream,’ revealing the emotional and financial toll of migration, labor, and remittance sending. This immersive experience offers a layered, reflective perspective on the immigrant journey, amplifying Jamaican voices in contemporary conversations about migration and identity.
Rasheed Peters is a Jamaican-born, Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and media professional specializing in nonfiction video making and installation art. Peters holds an M.F.A. in Documentary Media from Northwestern University and a B.A. from Brandeis University. Peters’ work bridges new and old media, archival materials, and dialogical practices to explore Black culture, immigrant experiences, and intersectionality. As a Black, queer and immigrant artist, his identities shape both his creative approach and the stories he tells, allowing him to foster intergenerational exchanges and craft spaces where underrepresented communities can see their narratives reflected.
Eyelnd Feevr AR reclaims Black narratives through Afrofuturist storytelling, highlighting resilience, identity, and empowerment via immersive, culturally rooted experiences that resonate with African American and global Black histories. The project is an augmented reality comic book that fuses Afrofuturism, cultural storytelling, and immersive technology to explore themes of identity, resilience and community. Through interactive AR experiences, readers explore the fictional world of Iltopia, where Black culture, social commentary and speculative futures intersect.
Steven Christian is a visual artist and founder of Iltopia Studios where he creates comics and cartoons to educate, entertain, and empower the next generation of creators. As one of the leading emerging voices in augmented reality and immersive storytelling, Christian combines his 10 years of software development and artistic expertise to help propel projects to new heights. He regularly consults and contracts Unity Technologies and many other companies to explore innovative ways to utilize emerging technology for consumer products and solutions. Christian’s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Unity for Humanities, Portland Art Museum, and Augmented World Expo.
Christian is currently an MD/PhD candidate at University of Nevada, Reno with a focus on Integrative Neuroscience as the first Black MD/PhD student in the history of the state.
Untitled Anatola Araba Project is an immersive 3D animated docuseries exploring how innovators across technology, ecology, architecture, and more are reimagining their industries to create a more sustainable tomorrow. Each episode reimagines one of the highest polluting industries according to the United Nations. We will meet experts who are at the forefront of ecological innovation in these fields. AI-powered, real-time, 3D animations visualize their discoveries, transporting us to distant futures, instilling us with hope about the future.
PRecently named Forbes 30 Under 30 in Art, Anatola Araba is a filmmaker, futurist, and founder of her studio, Reimagine Story Lab. Her films and multimedia creations have been exhibited at the MoMA, Lincoln Center and Art Basel. She recently made history when her art was sent to space on NASA’s first Moon mission since 1972. Raised in New York City, Anatola graduated from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She has spoken internationally and advised the United Nations on digital transformation. Her award-winning project, Afro Algorithms, was a 3D animated short film in the Afrofuturist genre that explores artificial intelligence and bias.
Run is a sci-fi, third-person exploration game set in a prairie where Black cookouts merge with the rhythms of wildfires. The game follows Runofer, known as “Run,”, an indecisive recluse who awakens in a smoke-filled grassland with no memory of the previous night — or how to return home. Guided by cryptic trail markers in the ground, Run must navigate many choices, uncover the secrets of the hazy landscape, and piece together the path back to safety.
Jeremy Kamal is an artist combining film, video games, music, and landscape architecture into a single expanded fictional universe. Using contemporary media, Kamal creates digital, sci-fi environments that challenge traditional ideas of culture and ecology. Kamal is an Onassis ONX fellow and was previously an artist resident at the Sundance Institute, NYU ITP, Folly Tree Arboretum, and AFROTECTOPIA. His work ”Stained” was awarded the Ars Electronica Distinction Award. Kamal has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and holds a ‘master’s in landscape architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a master’s s from SCI-Arc’s Fiction and Entertainment program.
The Veil and The Artifact is a VR fantasy genre game in which the player navigates through obstacles to achieve the goals of the family member they play as. The VR element integrates the user’s scanned environment to tell the story making each experience a personal one. The decisions that are made affect the plot differently and thus makes the gameplay different each time.
Joel Mack is a developer, storyteller, and creative technologist with more than a decade of experience in Unreal Engine development, immersive media, and experimental technology. Mack’s work bridges the gap between technology and narrative, using volumetric capture, artificial intelligence, and proprietary pipeline solutions to push storytelling and interactive experiences forward. Joel specializes in building advanced workflows that seamlessly integrate diverse technologies, ensuring that no tool is off limits when it comes to innovation. He has worked on both AAA films and independent projects, with proprietary previs and post-vis workflow.
Sam Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television editor, and documentary producer/director whose work spans more than thirty years. He was producer of the series Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads, and I’ll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community, which received The George Peabody Award.
Together with Spike Lee, Mr. Pollard co-produced Four Little Girls, about the 1963 Birmingham church bombings, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and When The Levees Broke, that received a Peabody and three Emmy Awards. Mr. Pollard has produced/directed feature-length documentaries including: Slavery By Another Name (PBS), August Wilson: The Ground On Which I Stand (PBS/American Masters), the critically-acclaimed MLK/FBI (2020); Black Art: In the Absence of Light (2021), Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power (2022). He won the Peabody Career Achievement Award, for “individuals whose work and commitment to broadcasting and digital media have left an indelible mark on the field and in American culture.”
