KOLBY
WEBSTER
film programmer
OCTOBER 18, 2020
7pm CST
(All Films and Panels will stream directly on this website)
LINK FOR LIVE PANEL @7pm CST,
OCTOBER 18, 2020 on Facebook Live
Films seeking rights to wrongs in spaces we hold dear. Gentrification, reclamation and spatial justice are centered in these BIPOC directed and written films. A panel featuring guests from each film will convene to discuss the intersections of the above themes across notable black spaces in the US including Tulsa’s own.
HOLD, HOPE, AND HEAL:
SPATIAL JUSTICE IN BLACK SPACES
filmmakers (FILMS WILL BE ON VIEW FROM OCTOBER 15-22, 2020)
SYMONE BAPTISTE
ASH GOH HUA
WASHINGTON KIRK
UFUOMA ESSI
panelists (PANEL WILL STREAM OCTOBER 18, 2020 @7pm CST )
SYMONE BAPTISTE
MIKE AFRICA JR
WASHINGTON KIRK
UFUOMA ESSI
FDB, Washington Kirk
All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Ufuoma Essi
Sixteen Thousand Dollars, Symone Baptiste
I’m Free Now, You Are Free, Ash Goh Hua
KOLBY WEBSTER programmer
Kolby Ari is a Tulsa, Oklahoma native that has a focus on urban design, sustainable land use and equitable community development. Kolby attempts to make typically dense and unfamiliar policy accessible through collaborations with the arts, city leaders and community stakeholders of all backgrounds. He has an extensive communications, grassroots, non-profits, and multi-media arts background that helps facilitate these groups towards best practice and inclusive designs.
ASH GOH HUA filmmaker
Ash Goh Hua (any pronouns) is a filmmaker and cultural worker from Singapore, based in New York. She creates documentary and experimental based work informed by the politics of abolition and autonomy; their filmmaking practice imagines future acts of collective liberation. Ash is a Jacob Burns Creative Culture Fellow, a NeXtDoc Fellow, a Points North Institute North Star Fellow, and a Common Notions collective member.
SYMONE BAPTISTE filmmaker/panelist
Symone Baptiste is a Director, Writer/Producer and Comedy Booker in Los Angeles. Symone’s short directorial debut, Sixteen Thousand Dollars, won Programmers’ Best Narrative Short at the 2020 Pan African Film Festival (LA) & Best Comedy Short at the Queens (NY) World Film Festival. Additionally, her film is an official selection for the 2020 Atlanta Film Festival, RiverRun Film Festival, Seattle Black Film Festival, DC Shorts Festival, San Francisco Black Film Festival, Portland Comedy Festival + more! Symone was also the Showrunner for season 1 of “Call & Response” a Funny or Die & Blavity Inc. project (hosted by Baron Vaughn & Open Mike Eagle) responding to the changes and activism of our time. She produced and directed 10 episodes that featured notable Black thought-leaders, activists, and allies including Patrisse Cullors (BLM), Uzo Aduba, Jane Fonda, and Robert Townsend.
WASHINGTON KIRK filmmaker/panelist
Washington Kirk (Writer / Director) was born in or near a subterranean nuclear silo in or around Great Falls, Montana [specifics classified], but raised in a Virginia suburb forgettable if not for its proximity to a great swamp. Note: This area has since been re-branded as part of “DMV” (the District-Maryland-Virginia, not the place of bureaucratic purgatory), a much cooler ahh-rea that provides much needed street-adjacent-cred to those unlucky enough to be born outside Anacostia... He is a maker, be it theater, television, film, messes, or pie (but not as of yet candlesticks), whose current work seeks to explore the “dangerous” behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes society — or in-group cultural forces — would rather us suppress. MFA, UCSD. Sundance New Voices finalist. As an actor, TV (selected): The Breaks (VH1), Divorce (HBO).
UFUOMA ESSI filmmaker
Ufuoma Essi Is a video artist and filmmaker from Lewisham, South East London. She works predominantly with film and moving image as well as photography and sound. Her work revolves around Black feminist epistemology and the configuration of displaced histories. The archive forms an essential medium for her as an artist and it’s through explorations with the archive that she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of political and historical narratives. By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery she seeks to re-centre the marginalised histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of black women.
MIKE AFRICA panelist
Mike Africa, Jr. is the founder of the Mike Africa Junior Information Company (MAJIC LLC) a member of The MOVE Organization, President of the Seed of Wisdom Foundation and the Black Philly Radical Collective. Mike is the son of two political prisoners who were each sentenced to 100 years in prison. He was secretly born in a Philadelphia prison following a police raid on his family’s home. As an infant, he was taken from his mother and placed in an orphanage where he was physically and mentally abused for 11 days before getting rescued by his aunt. At age 6, he witnessed the smoke in the air from a police bomb that was dropped on his family’s home killing his uncle, his cousin and nine members of his family, including five of the children he suffered in the orphanage with. At age 13, Mike began using his music to raise awareness about his experiences to gain justice for his family and others.
On June 16th, 2018, after 40 years in prison, Mike finally got his mother released. Four months later, on October 23rd, he successfully gained his father’s release. Mike‘s mission is to support the children of incarcerated parents. Mike has shared the stage with the likes of Marc Lamont Hill, Tarana Burke, Ramona Africa, Dead Prez, Danny Glover, Michael Franti, Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine and countless others, tackling issues such as mass incarceration, police brutality, climate change and many other profound issues of the day. In May of 2019, Mike took on a new venture. The “Mike Africa Junior Information Company” (MAJIC) is a multi-faceted entertainment brand created by Mike and his team featuring music, podcast, films other various forms of media broadcasting.
I’m Free Now, You Are Free, Ash Goh Hua, Film Still