When I started the second chapter of my life after the first in Photojournalism, I began a journey in cinema production, simultaneously curating programs featuring films like Shirley Clarke’s, Ornette Coleman: Made in America, where avante-garde master musician, Ornette Coleman himself made an appearance, and was cool as a mumma-mumma.

Joe Louis Wildman, my high school friend, Rainbow Coalition buddy and former co-director, at the National Committee to Combat Fascism in Maywood, IL introduced me to Chicago Filmmaker Coop. Joe was a comic/filmmaker/Groucho Marxist/Democratic Party operative and Union organizer who for a time was head of Chicago Filmmakers in the late 1970s. He dragged me along into the organization as a projectionist. 

I had no idea I would be at it this long, I thought I would continue my path as a photojournalist, but I was always interested in cinema, just never experienced an entree point until Joe, provided one . In 1982, I started the Blacklight Festival of International Black Cinema in cooperation with Chicago Filmmakers, where I am presently on the board of directors and with the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, during Richard Peña‘s tenure there. Without the cooperation of these two organizations there would have been no Blacklight, no Black World Cinema, no bwcTV.tv(now blacknuss.tv) and no Blacknuss Network.

Our lives are in chapters, we end one and begin another, other losing the details of the previous chapter in the making of a new one. In those first years there was no Facebook, no Linkedin. Even the first attempt at social media, AOL, did not exist. No Mosaic, no Netscape. There was IRC Chat at “The Well. America Online started 1985. Yet, for 12 years, I organized film screening and the Blacklight Film Festival by phone, fax, telex and snail mail.

Filmmakers, production companies and festivals around the world were my source for the compelling works I sought. I trolled the 18th arrondissement of Paris hunting down African filmmakers, attending festivals large and small.

I tracked films in the archives of East Berlin before The Wall fell. I sought the lost legacy of black and African participation in cinema history. Bukina Faso, Brazil, Japan, Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, and all over the US. I became, we with the help of the late Terry White Glover who worked with me long into the nights at Chicago Filmmaker planning the Blacklight Film Festival on NO MONEY, we just kind of made it happen. Of course the story is more complicated. In this post I am starting what will be a forensic blog on the anatomy of long deceased festival and it’s resurrection as a cutting edge organization entrenched in new media, exploring and participating in the future of digital storytelling while archiving the essential past of a far-reaching Global Black Cinema. We broke Menelik Shabazz’s first feature Burning An Illusion. Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It at the Fine Arts Theater on Michigan Ave with lines stretched back to Congress St. We premiered independent films like Larry Clark’s Passing through; Souleymane Cisse’s Yeelen; Julie Dash’s Daughters of The Dust. We highlighted the early works of the Black Film Workshops out of the UK by filmmakers, John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien. We screened works by Afro-Curaçaoan Felix de Rooy in from Amsterdamn . Blacklight did what the name implied, we brought the unseen to light.

In 2022 Blacknuss Network is the living ghost of Blacklight in a stealthy return. This revolution in digital storytelling, from gaming to VR and AR, included with traditional cinema creates a dialogue and exploration of new developing digital works, diverse and inclusive.

I’m going to stop here for now, and try to do a post or two a week with anecdotes from the early days of the path that lead to here, Including all the personalities from documentary filmmaker St Clair Bourne, Bill Gunn and Ishmael Reed.

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