Everything Controversial



Theatre Exile

The MotherFucker With The Hat (2022)

Lantern Theater

Travesties (2023)

BlackStar Film Festival

The African Desperate (2022)

Tonight, We Eat Flowers (2022)

The Daily Jawn (2024)

InterAct Theatre

The Last Parade (2023)

Philadelphia Theatre Company

The Garbologists (2022)

Annie Wilson

Always The Hour (2023)

Fringearts

Fall Away Into: Corridors of Rememory(2025)

Lantern Theater

Travesties (2023)

Philadelphia Theatre Company

The Garbologists (2022)

Human Rites

Lynnette R. Freeman plays a grad student that gets in the middle of an intense discussion on the practices of a certain group of people in Mali, initiating women into womanhood by female circumcision. Joe Guzmán plays the characteristic liberal professor with pressing charisma to entertain the argument. Kimberly S. Fairbanks, playing the dean of the school insinuates how inappropriate his research touches upon the culture of black women.

From 2018, this new play written by Seth Rozin, was a turbulent discussion between moral practices within academia, and personal essay into the opposition of an ancient tribal ritual, female genital mutilation.

In response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. This historical fictitious play analyses the Jewish Diaspora that occurs throughout history, and specifically from pograms by Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Army.

BlackStar Film Festival Staff Portrait 2022

The Blackstar Film Festival staff stand for a beacon of light for Art Institutions in Philadelphia. The community of various arts institutions and organizations have a joint mission in Philadelphia and throughout the global art scene. The new found realization of course comes from a world of activism, and systems intended to serve diverse communities. Through understanding and acknowledgement to these practices unforeseen in cultural backgrounds that have, like folk artists from centennials, or large amusement like displays of cultures from the 20th century, we are now seeing changes to organization’s missions, and specifically the literature on the distribution of power, racism, cultural institutions, and the archival process.


Theatre Exile

The Motherfucker With The Hat (2022)

BlackStar FIlm Festival

Tonight, We Eat Flowers (2022)


This year’s Philadelphia FilmMakers Lab featured a short film by Bettina Escauriza, Tonight, We Eat Flowers. The simplification of the story line is a pattern, leading roles include, J. Hernandez and Minou Pourshariati, emphasis on the medium of film, improvisation and represent this spontaneous fling for a light, inspiring production.

The Garbologists

Lindsay Joelle

Theater 2022

What are we looking at here are standards in character, or dialogue which make it especially moving. An unusual theme of waste management sanitary workers, initially draws us in as a genre, and a topic that consumes us – class differences.


The African Desperate

by Martine Syms

BlackStar Film Festival 2022

A growing and exciting movement follows in art where the representation and invitation to have a voice becomes even louder and cohorting better support for societal change. For example, the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia took the auteur lens of artists of color to advocate for a multicultural perspective in cinema, short films, and documentary features.

The film, “The African Desperate,” was released in select cinema’s for a special tour with Martine Syms and cast, producer Vic Brooks joined in at the post talks. The scene is very nostalgic with this striking cinematography about the black artist traversing visual art studies through the landscape of upstate New York University. The landscape and architecture is a reminder for the universal and a diaspora of ancestral hardship. 

For those of similar fellowship to, the MFA candidate, in the film, that experience and experimentation with art, expression, critics, testing friendships, recreational drugs, and romance. The University lifestyle in a feature film that encapsulated black artist complacent to their environment as the recognizable character as, ‘PALACE BRYANT’ played by Diamond Stingily.

From New York MOMA, Lincoln Center Films, Philadelphia Blackstar Film Festival and Melbourne Film Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Quad Cinema N.Y, L.A at Laemmle Theatres, and the Film Center in Chicago, these are the stops along the triumphant release until MUBI releases the film worldwide. The epic day trip into the double consciousness of Palace is an average day I suppose for the creative spirited, yet exhausted black feminine. That is, after all the W.E.B Du Bois definition for the minority body bereft of fully being in contemporary life, experience from inherited abuse, and this internal conflict projected on the consciousness of black youth, is called ‘double consciousness’. The African Desperate shows how the racial tension unconfronted becomes a sublimated message metaphor and taboo; a justly objection to the causality of abuse to black and indigenous cultures. 

The close-up camera shots, the wide angles, and stretched out perspectives, and overexposed light prisms align with illuminating sounds; all too ordinary in capturing the art school life under a naive lens. The tight group of  friends, in this region of New York State, shows how modern art, community, and life for them has formed new relationships armored  to an effectively vulnerable past through kinship. Yet as we all know the inclusive environment of institutionalized education secluded, separate from the wild social complexes that surround them beats to a different drum outside their reality. “The Dead Sisters,” a taped message on the back of  Palace’s long-sleeve shirt addresses the kind of connection between the girls in this environment. The clever yet stark humor that usually springs from a diverse group of students.

The last day of University, “The African Desperate,” spins off with a final critique, it sets the fondness of a small social circle, and the ridicule that might encircle the racial bias of an artist of color. “ Can we talk about the work, and not make me the work.” says Palace to the four critics. Quick sneer expressions, blank stares, and just awkward postures begins the feeling that this would continue on throughout the film. Outside Palace, under the guise of sunglasses, and dead-ass expressionless bleakness that breaks the tension.

The face of resistance is an expression that has the power to say the unspeakable. The fashion of the film of course, the pinnacle hairstyle of Palace for our generation is this reddish orange dye that comfortably reconstitutes the color of African American hair, and skin health.

La femme fatal of this story becomes witness and victim to the strange dealings of the landscape we became familiar with, but now with a taste of nightlife that leads our Palace into this startling dimmed light, and audiences should perceive the unwilling situation of doubleness with night and day reality.

The dualistic extremes for Palace becomes the realization of destructive external pressures. On a happy note, the inclusion and permeability of artwork by colored artists in the social sphere through larger institutions. Withstanding the persuasion of her classmates to stay, and take part in festivities that seem to grow into this kind of bacchanal. Fore mentioned are Palace’s desire to avoid this ritualistic happening. In the time of graduating from Master of Fine Art and social expectations where chasms of beauty, belonging, and sex pull our experiences in undesirable ways. The sexual entendres of digital communication on our video camera, or social media permits anybody to having this avatar, and Palace even vocalizes this “sex goddess”, with her bestie Hannah, when they reveal intimate experiences. The avatar is this image within an image, a screen over reality, and technological glyches such as this are Syms way of playing with the identity and representation of minority bodies in her art practices. The lighting of night and day deconstructs those structures by capturing neon, blacklight, and high aperture light drawing.

‘Eyes on the Prize’ producer Henry Hampton feature adaptation World Premiere at BSF22

We must redouble our efforts to recruit, train and then give substantive opportunities to African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and to others as producers and writers, creative and management talent. They will bring their own stories and passions that will, after experimentation, failures and second opportunities, succeed. … 

-Henry Hampton’s 1992 PBS Annual Meeting Keynote Speech

The Inheritance, directed by Ephaim Asili, is one film that takes place entirely inside an interior, even as far as personal growth and self discovery to illustrate the inside world of an artist collective. It takes us into this West Philly home and into the lives of the Move, an organization in West Philly. It is concerned with the internalized trauma of the Move Bombing in 1985.

Annie Wilson

Always the Hour (2023)

Annie Wilson

Transfiguration in Mourning and Nothingness

From the saga of, At Home With The Humorless Bastard

Fringearts

Fall Away Into: Corridors of Rememory(2025)