Black Women Directors Monthly June 2025
Filmmaker Raine Allen-Miller | Photo: Searchlight Pictures
June is here — my favorite month! — Which means summer is here, which means so many good things are coming to pass: Outdoor screenings. Black Music Month. Pride. Juneteenth. (And my birthday!) I must be honest, though; sometimes I still struggle with balancing joy with reflecting on the state of the U.S. and global politics, and how bleak things can seem. But there are things to celebrate, things to hold on to that make life worth getting out of bed for and living, such as making and creating art, supporting artists, and finding films that help us make sense of the world and our respective places in it. That’s worth everything.
Housekeeping Notes
👉🏾 BWD is in Marie Claire’s Power Issue! I’m truly honored to be included in Marie Claire for my work on Black Women Directors. When I started BWD ten years ago, I wanted to ensure that Black women and nonbinary filmmakers were not excluded from discussions about film history and culture. It began as a quiet labor of love, something I worked on after hours while holding down full-time photo editing jobs. It’s been so much fun researching and connecting with so many filmmakers over the years, and I hope this type of recognition draws even more attention and support to the directors whose work deserves to be seen, studied, funded, and celebrated. Read more here.
👉🏾 Join me on Letterboxd! I’ve had it for a while now, and I would love to connect with y’all there. Drop your Letterboxd in the comments, and also let me know your top 4! You can also read a little something I wrote for their Journal a couple of years ago here.
👉🏾 The first-ever BWD zine is still for sale! Order a print or digital copy here.
BWD News
Cheryl Dunye is making moves! Her Jingletown Films production company is in talks with potential partners to produce The Gilda Stories, based on Jewelle Gomez’s 1991 book. Dunye is also in pre-production on a queer dystopian sci-fi thriller, Black is Blue.
Help an independent filmmaker preserve Black history. Donate towards the production costs of Backcountry, Red Clay, a short film by Ireashia Bennett that “situates memory as resistance by reclaiming forgotten Black histories in Edgefield County, South Carolina amidst consumer-driven development and threats to Black cultural institutions.”
Recommended Events
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire screening dir: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich | BAM Brooklyn | June 6-12
Will screening dir: Jessie Maple (1937-2023) | BAM Brooklyn | June 13-19
Daughters screening dir: Angela Patton & Natalie Rae | Sisters in Cinema Media Arts Center, Chicago | June 14
Rafiki screening dir: Wanuri Kahiu | AFI Silver Theatre, DC/MD | June 14-18
Eve’s Bayou screening dir: Kasi Lemmons | Prospect Park, Brooklyn | June 19
The Forty-Year-Old-Version screening dir: Radha Blank | The Eagle Theater, Los Angeles | June 23
Filmmaker Opportunities
Sundance Documentary Film Fund
Documentary Fund Application Opens June 16
Sandbox Fund Application Opens June 23Afro-Indigenous Film and Media Summit Pitch Competition | Deadline: June 25
HBCU First Look Film Festival | Early Deadline: July 10
BWD Recommended Viewing
Zola (2020), dir: Janicza Bravo
Stream on Kanopy / Rent on Prime Video & Apple TV+
Zola, directed by Janicza Bravo, is as weird, wild, and unsettling (yet still darkly humorous) as the original #ZolaStory that dropped on Twitter one infamous night in 2015. The story, based on wild but true events as told by A’Ziah King, follows two exotic dancers—one Black (Taylour Paige) and one white (Riley Keough, who, between Zola, American Honey, and Dixieland, is building a fascinating ethnography of white trash archetypes)—who take a trip to Florida that goes horribly wrong.
The acting, cinematography, and especially the score by Mica Levi, along with the sound design, are truly exceptional.
Paige and Keough have fantastic onscreen chemistry, capturing the subtle dance and shifts between prey and predator.
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The ballad of Suzanne cesaire will also be at the Siskel this month 🙌🏾
Love the 'stack. I'm at https://letterboxd.com/Fromtheyard/ !