From March 7-9, the 29th Hayti Heritage Film Festival in Durham will center Black stories around the theme "Homecoming" with 39 different film screenings and teaching workshops.
“Because we are a southern town, Black southern films became our tagline, and we wanted to preserve the rich history and legacy of those stories — not only of the Hayti community, but the larger Southern Black experience,” the festival's director, Tyra Dixon, said.
The festival is hosted in the Hayti Heritage Center in Durham. The center is one of the last standing buildings of Hayti, once a self-sustaining Black community that was demolished by the construction of Highway 147 in the 1970s.
The festival’s genre of Black Southern film includes not only the American South, but the Global South, showing films within the global African diaspora such as Burkina Faso and Puerto Rico.
Courtney Reid-Eaton is a visual artist collaborating with the festival's featured organization Black Feminist Film School. For her, showcasing Black Southern film is important because media and histories taught in school for generations have presented Black and brown people's humanity without fullness. Reid-Eaton said that white supremacist culture is centered on the normativity and neutrality of whiteness, a concept they said is not real.
“Having the opportunity to see Black films by Black filmmakers gives us more access to our experiences of interiority — how we are fully, how we are more wholly, who we are as people of this particular culture, this African diasporic culture in the world, what that looks like," she said.
The festival will hold workshops in various forms of production such as lighting, directing and blocking, in order to curate the next generation of filmmakers and storytellers, Dixon said. This year’s schedule includes an evolutionary filmmaking workshop by Black Feminist Film School and a masterclass with actor Omar J. Dorsey.
There will also be a panel highlighting Black perspectives in film and video post-production presented by Post in Black, a podcast showcasing Black excellence behind the lens, according to their website. The podcast's host David Hunter Jr. will speak with UNC alums Landon Bost and Jazmine Bunch about their experience in the post-production industry.
Bost said the Hayti Heritage Film Festival was one of his favorite festivals to attend — his documentary for Media and Journalism 681: Documentary Projects, "Black Saviors," was filmed down the street from the Hayti Heritage Center and screened in last year’s festival. Bost called this a full circle moment.
