The inaugural Ottawa Black Film Festival (OBFF), celebrating Black voices and filmmakers, was held virtually March 25 to 28.
Launched by the Fabienne Colas Foundation—which has also founded Black film festivals in Montreal, Toronto and Halifax—the festival featured 31 feature-length and short films, along with five panels.
Andrea Este, OBFF head programming co-ordinator, said the Black Film Festival expanded to Ottawa because of its large Black population.
“Negative stereotypes of Black people have dominated the big screen for far too long,” Este told the Charlatan in an email. “With more opportunities for Black filmmakers behind and in front of the camera, the narrative will change and marginalization will stop.”
David Peddie, a writer and director who graduated from York University’s cinema and media studies program in 2020, directed Fractured: A Broken School System, one of the films featured at OBFF.
Fractured is a nine-minute documentary on anti-Black racism within Canadian school systems. The film includes interviews with Kearie Daniel, Charline Grant and Claudette Rutherford, Black activists from advocacy group Parents of Black Children.
Peddie said his experiences are what motivated him to create Fractured. When Peddie came to Canada from Jamaica in 2012, he said he realized not all students are treated equally.
“I saw that Black students were treated differently in some ways when it comes to telling them to be in certain [educational] streams, like academic and applied,” Peddie said. “I just wanted to tell this story.”
Peddie said the goal of the film is for people to understand the experience of Black students.
“I want people to feel how isolated some Black students feel,” he said. “I want them to know that every student doesn’t have the same opportunities. They don’t experience school the same.”
The film was developed through the Colas Foundation’s Being Black in Canada program, which aims to support young Black filmmakers and “make up for the blatant lack of diversity and the lack of Black people in front and behind the camera in Canada,” Este wrote.
Peddie said while he could have made Fractured without the help of the program, it’s hard to create a film from the ground-up. The program, which broadcasts the films on national television and at the Black Film Festival, also provides a more visible platform for Peddie’s work, he said.
Peddie said he filmed Fractured in November 2020 and had to improvise because of COVID-19 restrictions in Toronto. He said he had to find spaces large enough to stay physically distanced from his interview subjects.
Este said the biggest challenges in hosting an online film festival came during the Montreal International Black Film Festival, their first festival in the COVID-19 era. Organizers had to find platforms to host events and panels online and discover new ways to promote the festival.
OBFF and other Black film festivals help Black filmmakers reach a larger audience, Peddie said.
“It helps to get Black filmmakers and Black stories a platform,” Peddie said. “They’re not at the bottom of the list. They’re right there.”
Featured graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.
