BlackStar Head Maori Karmael Holmes On The Festival’s Record 2025 Edition & Upcoming 15th Anniversary: “It’s Been A Real Privilege And Blessing”

BlackStar Projects, the parent organization of the BlackStar Film Festival, will host its third annual Luminary Gala this month in Philadelphia, with Sinners DoP Autumn Durald Arkapaw and legendary filmmaker Robert Townsend, best known for his seminal satire Hollywood Shuffle (1987), among the list of names that will receive career honors at the event.

BlackStar first launched its Luminary Awards in 2012, with previous honorees including Mira Nair, Menelik Shabazz, Ava DuVernay, Julie Dash, and Wu-Tang’s RZA. The Luminary Gala is an offshoot event launched by BlackStar in 2023. The Gala serves as a presentation for the awards as well as a fundraiser for the Festival, which celebrates its 15th anniversary next year.

“I’m shocked that it’s already been 15 years,” Maori Karmael Holmes, founder, Chief Executive, and Artistic Officer of BlackStar Projects, told us ahead of this year’s Gala. “It’s been a real privilege and blessing to have been able to launch this and create something that other people were also interested in and found resonant. I just did not imagine this. But at the same time, I have even bigger dreams.”

For those outside the loop, the BlackStar Film Festival is an annual festival hosted each August in Philadelphia, with a programme centered on film work created by Black, brown, and indigenous filmmakers. Across its 15 years, BlackStar has given early festival births to work by filmmakers like Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere) and Dream Hampton (Treasure: From Tragedy to Trans Justice, Mapping a Detroit Story), making it an essential stop on the circuit for writers, curators, and general audiences seeking work by a diverse range of filmmakers.

Alongside traditional narrative work, BlackStar has grown into an essential stop for artists and filmmakers working predominantly in the gallery context, like Arthur Jafa, Garrett Bradley, and Ja’Tovia Gary. The festival’s 2025 edition, which handed gala screenings to Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions and Rachael Holder’s Love, Brooklynclocked a record number of attendees.

Below, Holmes speaks to Deadline in depth about the festival’s first 15 years of operations, including her battles with studios and distributors to secure films, programming across the film and art space, and her plans for the festival’s future.

The 2025 Luminary honors list is rounded out by singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello and the U.S.-based distribution outfit Third World Newsreel. The sold-out Luminary Gala will take place on November 21 at Switch House in Philadelphia.

DEADLINE: Maori, I’ve read that 2025 marked a record year for BlackStar. Was that a record in attendance?

MAORI KARMAEL HOLMES: Yeah, a record for attendance since we’ve been keeping attendance. For the first nine years of the festival, there was no organization behind it. I was doing 80% of the work year-round and bringing on a team in May to facilitate the execution of the production. But in terms of marketing, fundraising, and bookkeeping, it was a one-person show. Once we started BlackStar Projects as a full-time organization in January 2020, of course, it was COVID. So those numbers were quite different. We don’t really know what the numbers were before because we didn’t have the means to track them.

DEADLINE: Can you share the final attendance figure?

HOLMES: We issued around 23,000 tickets between online and in-person.

DEADLINE: I was surprised to hear it was only the festival’s 15th anniversary. I thought it was much older. I don’t really remember a time when it wasn’t very present as an important event.

HOLMES: It doesn’t feel that way internally, but I’m glad that’s how you see it. It’s been precarious the whole time. If I’m honest — and perhaps I’m being too forthright — but every year, people would ask me if the festival was happening again. I would always respond that I don’t know. If we raise the money, then yes. From 2012 to 2019, we always worried whether we had the money to do this. It was by hook or crook. So I’m glad it feels like it’s always been there, but it has been challenging.

It’s also interesting to think about different receptions of the festival, because there are some people for whom BlackStar is a kind of Mecca. And then other people’ve never heard of us, and their studios treat us like that. We frequently try to negotiate screening a film, and people will be dismissive of us in the process. We’ve had films where a director really wants to screen with us, but their distributor is playing games because they don’t recognize us or haven’t heard of us. So there is no comfort or ease for me. I don’t approach any of the festivals with any bravura because I just feel very humbled every single year.

DEADLINE: What are your interactions with studios like? What are they saying to you?

HOLMES: It depends on whether they’ve heard of us. Sometimes there is a warm reception, and generally that’s from the filmmakers. Some directors might say yes, and then when it comes to their studio or the distributor, they’re asking, ‘Who is this festival?’ We often have to fight with distributors and studios to convince them that we’re worth them sending their project to us.

DEADLINE: I’ve always found the programming at BlackStar to be so interesting. There is work created for the gallery space by artists like Arthur Jafa, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Garrett Bradley. But there is also traditional narrative work like Rachael Holder’s Love, Brooklyn. That’s how I feel my crowd of cinephiles approach cinema, but it’s rare to find that at festivals, particularly in North America.

HOLMES: The simplest answer is that I was programming for myself. Just as you’re saying that that’s how you and your folks watch things, that’s how my folks and I watch things. So we were programming for ourselves. We would often see certain work siloed into specific kinds of festivals, or filmmakers making work that doesn’t get back to the community for whom they made it. A lot of independent film, and particularly experimental film, stays in a kind of white circuit. I know that folks like Arthur Jafa, Terence Nance, and Ja’Tovia Gary want Black people to see their work. But many of the pre-existing Black film festivals before we came along were more interested in work that was Hollywood-facing, so we knew there were people out there who wanted to see those works alongside each other.

Also, it’s a political project as well as a curatorial one. The political project is representation. I want to see us on the screen in certain kinds of ways. And the curatorial project: We started as an African diasporic festival, and over the years, other folks of Color asked to join. I’m a student of solidarity movements from the 70s, so it made sense to me, and we continued to expand. So now we say that we’re focused on the global majority. We’re focusing on all folks of color, specifically Black, Brown, and indigenous filmmakers who make all kinds of work. We’re not staying in a particular box, so some work is going to be Hollywood-facing like a Love, Brooklyn. And then there’s going to be more challenging experimental work, like something that Ja’Tovia might make.

DEADLINE: BlackStar works with a lot of big corporate sponsors like Comcast, and many of these companies have changed drastically in the context of this second Trump presidency. How do you expect the current climate to impact your work?

HOLMES: It’s already had an impact. Comcast was a big supporter of ours. But I’m not sure that I’m worried. I’m as worried as all of us need to be about our country, but in terms of our project, my hope and what has been true so far is that when one partner leaves, another emerges. So far, that has been the case. I’m not resting on that by any means. We’ve also had to adjust. I’ve had to lay off some of our full-time team. We’ve had to change parts of our functions. So, yeah, it’s not comfortable. Like everyone at this time, we’re dealing with the very serious repercussions of this moment.

DEADLINE: This year’s Luminary Gala. Autumn Durald Arkapaw and the legendary Robert Townsend are among the honorees. You started the gala in 2022? Why?

HOLMES: No, the first gala was in 2023. But we’ve been giving honors since the very first festival. We have also strategically been trying to arrange a fundraising aspect related to the awards. I’ve worked in museums and other nonprofits, and that’s how they did it. People had galas for these kinds of things, because sometimes you can attract people to a gala who may not come to your film festival. We had some award ceremonies before 2020 that just weren’t as robust, because there wasn’t really capacity. Again, it was trying to corral people who had other jobs to do these things on the side. That was really challenging. Now that we have a full-time organization and board, we can produce a real gala, so we decided to give it a try.

Traditionally, as a nonprofit, you do a gala for five years, after which you are usually able to earn money from it. We have started turning a profit in advance of that timeline. My hope was always to create an opportunity to engage with donors and also have a fun party where people get to be fabulous. Also, it’s a moment to celebrate all the work we’ve done for the year. It’s a moment to connect.

DEADLINE: Thinking about awards, are you at all interested in moving the festival to align more closely with the fall awards season character?

HOLMES: People are coming and submitting, so there’s no reason for us to change right now. We’ve definitely considered in the past doing a ceremony in L.A. around award season. I’m not averse to that, but it would require a different kind of budget and different kinds of partners than we currently have. However, I’m also curious if that would serve us. It’s been my personal experience that running to the industry doesn’t always serve what we’re trying to do. We exist in this liminal space between the art world and Hollywood, and frankly, the social justice space. We’re trying to operate in all of those at the same time. We’re not only concerned with the Hollywood awards season, but we’re also thinking about what is happening in other spaces. So I wouldn’t say we’re not gonna move, but right now, if people are coming, I think we’re good.

DEADLINE: For the next 15 years, what are your aims for the festival?

HOLMES: I want us to have all the resources we need to do the work that we’re doing. And I’d like for filmmakers to have the resources they need to do the work that they’re doing. And I’ll leave it at that.