The Black Bottom Film Festival is back at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center next week with a major revamp in programming but the same goal of chronicling the Black experience through film, Janis Burley Wilson said. “Our mission is to tell the stories of the African American experience and the African diaspora across genres,” said Burley Wilson, the CEO of the AWAACC. “We do music, theater, dance, visual arts. We present films like we’re doing for our film festival.” The Black Bottom Film Festival, a celebration and exploration of Black film, will run from October 27 to 29 at the AWAACC Downtown and offers up a packed three days of premieres, classics, seminars and workshops. The festival is presented by Citizens Bank and curated by the founders of the Micheaux Film Festival in Los Angeles. Founded in 2017 and after an intermission for COVID, the Black Bottom Film Festival took submissions from independent creators for the first time this year, Burley Wilson said. Previously, the festival would attract people from as far as Washington, D.C., or Cleveland, but by scaling up the programming, she said she hopes to bring in a larger group of attendees. “Having film submitted from people in India or Iran–that’s taking it far beyond the state lines of Pennsylvania,” Burley Wilson, said. “So [I’m] really excited about the possibilities that will come about from handling it this way.” The AWACC tapped Noel Braham and Courtney Branch, the founders of the Micheaux Film Festival, to curate this year’s films and assist with programming. Branch said the Micheaux Film Festival, named after the pioneering Black director Oscar Micheaux, showcases multicultural and racially diverse films, so she said she appreciated the opportunity to solely arrange stories on “Black narratives.”

Photo credit: Evan Levine/Pittsburgh Media Partnership