On the festival’s opening night, our panel of distinguished jury members will be presenting The Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Black Harvest Film Festival Prize to deserving filmmakers. This year marks the eighth year that a $1,000 prize will be awarded to a short film, and the fifth year a $2,500 prize will honor a feature film.
The winning films will be presented at the Gene Siskel Film Center during the 31st Black Harvest Film Festival.
2025 Jurors
Jheanelle Brown
Jheanelle Brown is a film curator, educator, and writer in Los Angeles, whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and nonfiction film and video. She is on faculty at California Institute of the Arts, curates the Film at REDCAT program, and is a Los Angeles Filmforum programmer. At this moment, she is dreaming about cosmic marronage whilst trying to remember her terrestrial obligations.
David Fortune
David Fortune is an Atlanta-based writer and director whose debut feature, COLOR BOOK, premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Festival and went on to win jury and audience awards at Austin, Deauville, Denver, Chicago’s Black Harvest Film Festival, and numerous others. The film earned him Variety’s “10 Directors to Watch” distinction and a 2025 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Breakthrough Creative. Fortune’s earlier works include US (Netflix Content Creator Program) and SHOEBOX (Indeed–Hillman Grad’s Rising Voices, acquired by Amazon Studios). A graduate of Morehouse College and Loyola Marymount University, he has held directing fellowships with Netflix, Paramount, and Village Roadshow, among others. His storytelling foregrounds humanity and depth within cinematic worlds.
Darol Olu Kae
Darol Olu Kae is an award-winning filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His films have screened internationally at Locarno, Sundance, South By Southwest (SXSW), Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Film at Lincoln Center, New York City’s The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) , and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. In 2022, he was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” His work, spanning experimental and narrative forms, often meditates on memory, family, and Black life. Kae is a recipient of a Creative Capital grant and is currently developing his debut feature, WITHOUT A SONG.
