The Hayti Heritage Film Festival was born out of a desire to keep the Hayti community’s rich culture alive. Once a self-sustaining Black community in the heart of Durham, Hayti quickly fell by the wayside after city officials failed to make good on their promise to rebuild a portion of the neighborhood decimated by Highway 147’s construction.
In 1994, the event debuted inside what is now the Hayti Heritage Center. Formerly St. Joseph’s AME Church, the building stands as one of the last original structures from the Hayti community’s growth in the early 1900s. Fittingly, this year’s theme is “homecoming.”
“Unlike other film festivals, this one stands out because it is very specific in the audience that it’s trying to connect to,” festival publicist Kimberly Knight says. “It offers the richness of coming to the city of Durham and being actually located, physically, downtown.”
Scheduled for March 7-9, the festival will be fully in-person for the first time since before the pandemic. It features nine programming blocks, several opportunities to meet influential figures in the Black film community and a live podcast recording. The event will take place at the Hayti Heritage Center, right on the outskirts of the Hayti District and North Carolina Central University.
This year’s fully in-person festival will highlight 32 films across several genres, including full-length narratives and international shorts. The Hayti Heritage Center is also partnering with Working Films, a Wilmington-based organization dedicated to positioning documentaries to increase local, state, and national civic engagement. The two groups will be hosting a Works In Progress lab for two promising filmmakers from the area.
“These are filmmakers that we feel are on the cusp of being really great filmmakers, and just need a little more mentorship around how to tell their story in the most dynamic way,” festival director Tyra Dixon says. “Both of their films have to do with land and legacy, so it fits into our theme of homecoming.”
A free pre-festival event—a screening of the film Gaining Ground—will preview the festival on Friday, February 23, and on Thursday, March 7, the event officially kicks off with a screening of Little Richard: I Am Everything and a conversation with director/producer Lisa Cortés. Nine blocks of film programming are spread across the following two days, and the festival will cap with a dialogue between actor Omar J. Dorsey (Selma, Harriet) and Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal.
This year’s lineup features a plethora of films showcasing perspectives from Black subjects and communities. In a conversation with the INDY, Dixon highlighted Bite of Bénin, a short film directed by Durham locals Brad Herring and Adé Carrena. Carrena, named North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association’s Chef of the Year, paints a vivid portrait of her relationship with food and how it represents the culture and history she grew up with before relocating, at age ten, to the United States.
“The film is about her journey,” Dixon says. “Not only her familial journey, but her food journey, and how she’s bringing back those traditions and cultural aspects of her African heritage to her American heritage.”
The full lineup can be found here. All-access and day passes are now on sale.
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