What to watch at Roxbury International Film Fest, a celebration of people of color

For the past 26 years, the Roxbury International Film Festival has brought conversation and community to Boston area movie lovers. Artistic/Executive Director Lisa Simmons has been a part of it since day one.

“RoxFilm focuses on celebrating people of color around the world,” a busy Simmons said on a phone call between meetings and making last-minute arrangements ahead of the festival. “We want to uplift voices, individual stories and organizations that really impact the Black and brown community. The wonderful thing about all of the different film festivals in the Boston area is that they have niche, specific audiences, yet they also appeal to a larger audience. It really serves as an opportunity to learn about and be inspired by stories that you don’t always see in mainstream media.”

Offering 10 days of film screenings, panel discussions, live script readings and filmmaker hangouts, this year’s RoxFilm runs from Thursday, June 20 through Friday, June 28 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Northeastern University, MassArt and Dudley Street’s historic Hibernian Hall, with additional online screenings available from Thursday, June 27 through Tuesday, July 2, in case you can’t get there in person. RoxFilm@Home was a COVID-19-era necessity that Simmons decided to make permanent. “We still think that’s an important part of the festival. It makes things accessible to people who otherwise would not have been able to come out for some reason.”

But ideally, RoxFilm is designed to be an interactive experience. “I think that film festivals — and especially our film festival — offer the opportunity to use film as a catalyst so that we can all be in one place, in person, to have a conversation and feel that energy in the room,” Simmons said. “We’re a filmmaker’s festival, and it’s really important for filmmakers to get to screen their films in front of an audience that gets to ask them questions, to see the reactions, to get that feedback. That’s a really important part of being an artist. And I think that audience members love being in a space with other people who are there for likeminded reasons.”

This year’s festival kicks off on Thursday afternoon at MassArt with a keynote from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson, author of “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents,” in conversation with Simmons and M. Lee Pelton, president and CEO of The Boston Foundation. Then put on your dancing shoes for the opening night film, “Luther: Never Too Much,” director Dawn Porter’s portrait of R&B legend Luther Vandross, the “Velvet Voice” responsible for decades of baby-making music.

A vital piece of local history, director Crosby Tatum’s “The People, United! A Cinematic Diary” (Friday, June 21) takes us back to the long, hot summer of 2020 when protests following the murder of George Floyd galvanized a pandemic-stricken nation coming apart at the seams. Tatum’s sprawling, impressionistic documentary marches from one demonstration to another, mostly in the Greater Boston area. You’ll see familiar scenes on the Common and at the steps of the Boston Public Library, but the movie becomes even more fascinating when Tatum ventures out to cover protests in unexpected places like Norwell. (The middle-aged lady in Scituate starting static with young activists while brandishing an iced coffee from Dunkin’ in her hand is like a sentient composite of Massachusetts stereotypes.)

“We’re shorts people,” Simmons said. Indeed, RoxFilm is screening more than 60 short films this year, whether as part of the festival’s 11 themed shorts packages or before, after and sometimes even sandwiched in between the features. On certain evenings, Simmons has paired simpatico genre pictures like the crime thrillers “Lipstick” and “Sway” (Wednesday, June 26) or domestic dramedies “Money Game” and “Ugly Sweater” (Sunday, June 23). “We’re doing a double feature thing this year, kind of like in the ‘30s, when you would come to the movies for the whole night. We’re gonna do a box dinner. We’re gonna make it fun.”

Of local interest among the documentary shorts, Joel Wolpert’s “H: Strength is in the Pack” (Wednesday, June 26) follows Coach Hatim Jean-Louis of the Boston Public Schools’ cross country running program, offering inspiration and guidance in a sport where kids from the inner city seldom excel. (The logistics alone can seem insurmountable. For starters, where do you run?) Elsewhere on the athletic field, Federico Muchnik’s “Homage to Abbas” (Wednesday, June 26) borrows the framework of the great Abbas Kiarostami’s 1989 film “Homework,” chatting with a handful of young students on a Cambridge soccer pitch. Their casual conversations can turn deathly serious in a heartbeat, and I’m still not sure if there’s something depressingly dystopian or heroically resilient about the kid who was really excited that his dad took him to Market Basket to make him feel better after an active shooter incident at school.

Emerson College professor Thato R. Mwosa’s first feature “Memoirs of a Black Girl” won Best Narrative at RoxFilm in 2021. She’s back this year with not one, but two short films displaying uncommon sensitivity to the travails of their teenage characters. “Desmond in Motions” (Sunday, June 23) is about a young man surrounded by friends celebrating their college acceptance notifications, trying to be happy for them while keeping it a secret that he didn’t get into his own first-choice school. “Temple” (Thursday, June 27) charts how a stray comment by an insensitive friend can send a teen girl’s self-esteem spiraling, with the feedback loops of social media and unethical advertisers only serving to aggravate the issue.

You won’t find concepts more original than that of C.C. Randle’s “A Mind of Its Own” (Sunday, June 23), a short in which a Black woman working in a lily-white office finds her co-workers’ constant microaggressions answered by her very angry afro. It’s a puppet perched on the actress’ head, but also a pungent metaphor for the way employees of color are expected to tamp down and straighten out that which comes natural in the name of conformity. (The hot comb plays a heavy-duty symbolic role here.) This is a wonderfully silly movie about serious matters.

The festival’s closing night film, “Sing Sing” (Friday, June 28), boasts another riveting performance from Colman Domingo, following up his “Rustin” Oscar nod as a wrongly convicted inmate who gets through his days behind bars by performing in a prison theater troupe. Based on a true story and co-starring a lot of the real-life participants as themselves, it’s a powerful story about the transformative power of art. If this sounds familiar, it might be because “Sing Sing” screened in May at the Independent Film Festival Boston with director Greg Kwedar and co-star Mosi Eagle in attendance. But RoxFilm is coming at the movie from another angle.

“We’re doing a different conversation around it,” Simmons noted. “We’re bringing in returning citizens who have served time and having a conversation about the importance of using arts and culture within these environments in order to help people return to communities in a more productive way. It’s going to be a panel discussion, so I’m really looking forward to that.”

Such an approach is characteristic of what Simmons stresses is RoxFilm’s commitment to creating dialogue.

“It’s important to have those conversations about where we are in 2024,” she said. “How did we get here, and what are we missing?”

The 26th annual Roxbury International Film Festival runs from Thursday, June 20 through Friday, June 28. Online screenings will be available from Thursday, June 27 through Thursday, July 2.