Special Presentation | Black Harvest opens with four standout short films, presentation of the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Prize, and a post-screening reception celebrating the filmmakers and the future of Black cinema.

Special Presentation | For more than five decades, the Community Film Workshop of Chicago (CFWC) has championed Black filmmakers and artists of color through education, mentorship, and independent production.

Short Film Program | SPACE IS THE PLACE celebrates the possibilities of Black imagination through science fiction, supernatural horror, surrealism, visionary storytelling, and speculative world-building.

Short Film Program | EVERYDAY PEOPLE considers community as a living practice, sustained through shared histories, spiritual traditions, cultural expression, political struggle, and everyday acts of care.

Short Film Program | TO KNOW HER IS TO LOVE HER centers the interior lives of Black women and femmes through stories of motherhood, healing, identity, illness, memory, embodiment, and self-definition. 

Short Film Program | WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? brings together stories of lives in transition, where personal decisions, unexpected encounters, and moments of reckoning reshape the future.

Special Presentation | Set in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, IF I GO WILL THEY MISS ME? follows a young Black father and his imaginative son as they navigate grief, housing precarity, and the enduring bonds of community.

Short Film Program | ABOUT HIM offers an expansive portrait of Black manhood grounded not in dominance or performance, but in care.

Special Presentation | BLACK PANTHER & THE SIGHT UNSEEN brings together historic archival documentation and the work of acclaimed Chicago-based filmmaker Shawn Antoine II.

Feature Film | LISTEN TO ME follows three extraordinary Black women working on the frontline of the maternal health movement as they navigate institutional racism, the complexities of childbirth, and the urgent fight for reproductive justice in the United States. 

Feature Film | Five generations of the Obie family heal through the Indigenous practice of farming while confronting heartbreaking challenges as outside forces threaten to separate them from their land. 

Feature Film | DREAMS IN NIGHTMARES follows three estranged childhood friends who embark on an impromptu road trip across America, transforming a journey through familiar landscapes into an intimate reckoning with grief, desire, friendship, and the ghosts of their shared past.  

Short Film Program | EVERYDAY PEOPLE considers community as a living practice, sustained through shared histories, spiritual traditions, cultural expression, political struggle, and everyday acts of care.

Feature Film | Master documentarian William Greaves presents extraordinary archival footage from a legendary 1972 gathering at Duke Ellington's Harlem townhouse. 

Short Film Program | SPACE IS THE PLACE celebrates the possibilities of Black imagination through science fiction, supernatural horror, surrealism, visionary storytelling, and speculative world-building.

Feature Film | Five generations of the Obie family heal through the Indigenous practice of farming while confronting heartbreaking challenges as outside forces threaten to separate them from their land. 

Short Film Program | BLACK AND BLUR brings together artists who approach cinema as a site of inquiry, ritual, performance, archive, and experimentation.

Feature Film | LISTEN TO ME follows three extraordinary Black women working on the frontline of the maternal health movement as they navigate institutional racism, the complexities of childbirth, and the urgent fight for reproductive justice in the United States. 

Short Film Program | WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? brings together stories of lives in transition, where personal decisions, unexpected encounters, and moments of reckoning reshape the future.

Short Film Program | TO KNOW HER IS TO LOVE HER centers the interior lives of Black women and femmes through stories of motherhood, healing, identity, illness, memory, embodiment, and self-definition. 

Short Film Program | AFTER HOURS explores the uneasy space where attraction, desire, obsession, and fear collide.

Short Film Program | ABOUT HIM offers an expansive portrait of Black manhood grounded not in dominance or performance, but in care.

Feature Film | DREAMS IN NIGHTMARES follows three estranged childhood friends who embark on an impromptu road trip across America, transforming a journey through familiar landscapes into an intimate reckoning with grief, desire, friendship, and the ghosts of their shared past.  

Short Film Program | ANCESTRAL FUTURES traces a lineage of Black speculative cinema that reaches backward as much as it imagines forward.

Special Presentation | Set in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, IF I GO WILL THEY MISS ME? follows a young Black father and his imaginative son as they navigate grief, housing precarity, and the enduring bonds of community.

Feature Film | Through the intimate reflections of friends, former students, close collaborators, and fellow revolutionary artists, TCB – THE TONI CADE BAMBARA SCHOOL OF ORGANIZING traces the extraordinary life, intellectual rigor, and cultural legacy of writer, filmmaker, educator, and visionary cultural worker Toni Cade Bambara.

Short Film Program | SHORTS FROM THE BLOCK celebrates Chicago as both place and practice, a city continually shaped by its artists, organizers, institutions, and neighborhoods.

Short Film Program | TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS considers love not as romance alone, but as a sustained practice of care.

Feature Film | Can Blackness truly escape the historical violence of its origins? Seeking an answer, three Black men embark on a transformative, restorative pilgrimage tracing the transatlantic slave route in reverse.

Feature Film | A landmark work of ethnographic and cultural preservation, VOICES OF THE GODS foregrounds the Akan and Yoruba religious traditions as they are actively practiced and sustained within the United States.  

Special Presentation | MEMORY & STYLE: SOJOURN & CANDY PAINT brings together two formally inventive works that explore identity, memory, and the ways Black life is archived through personal and collective expression.

Feature Film | Through the intimate reflections of friends, former students, close collaborators, and fellow revolutionary artists, TCB – THE TONI CADE BAMBARA SCHOOL OF ORGANIZING traces the extraordinary life, intellectual rigor, and cultural legacy of writer, filmmaker, educator, and visionary cultural worker Toni Cade Bambara.

Short Film Program | SHORTS FROM THE BLOCK celebrates Chicago as both place and practice, a city continually shaped by its artists, organizers, institutions, and neighborhoods.

Special Presentation | Presented in partnership with Jupiter Magazine, this special presentation celebrates the pioneering cinematic work of Burkinabè filmmaker Fanta Régina Nacro.

Special Presentation | Adapted from Solomon Northup's landmark 1853 autobiography Twelve Years a Slave, Gordon Parks' powerful historical drama follows Northup, a free Black musician from Saratoga, New York, who is deceived, kidnapped, and sold into chattel slavery in 1841.