TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing
- Wed, Feb 11
Please select a showtime button above to buy tickets.
*Limited Walk-Up shows no longer have online tickets for sale. A limited number of tickets will be available at the box office 45 minutes before a show's start time, on a first-come first-served basis. Standby tickets will be available when Walk-Ups are sold out.
Director: Louis Massiah, Monica Henriquez Run Time: 105 min. Format: Digital Release Year: 2025
Producer: Louis Massiah
Co-Presented by community programming partners BlackStar Projects and featuring a conversation with co-director and producer Louis Massiah.
Author, educator, activist, and documentary filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara, with humor and deep insight, inspired a generation of artists to dedicate themselves to community empowerment. Editor of the breakthrough anthology The Black Woman (1970) and author of The Salt Eaters (1980) among other acclaimed works, Bambara came to Philadelphia and worked with Louis Massiah on the truth-telling documentary The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986) and remained an activist and cultural worker in film and literature until her untimely death in 1995. TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025, 105 min.) is a testament to their long and generative collaboration.
Massiah’s film, co-directed with and edited by Monica Henriquez, is structured as a series of lessons on cultural organizing, gleaned from Bambara’s life and shared by her friends, colleagues and students. Not yet widely released, the film received its world premiere opening night at BlackStar Film Festival in August, where it was awarded Best Feature Documentary by the jury, voted Favorite Feature Documentary by the audience, and called “riveting” by Variety. Featuring: Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, Haile Gerima, Shirikiana Aina, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Manthia Diawara, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Malaika Adero, Linda Holmes, Conor Tomás Reed, Makeba Lavan and Clyde Taylor.
About Louis Massiah
Louis Massiah’s award-winning documentaries include The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986); W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices (1996), two episodes of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize II (1987), and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown (2002). Recipient of many accolades, including a duPont-Columbia Award, a Peabody, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and a local Emmy for his coverage of the MOVE Commission Hearings, Massiah is founder and director of Scribe Video Center, a leading Philadelphia-based nonprofit media arts center that seeks to explore, develop, and advance media as art and tool for progressive social change. From 2010-2012, Massiah served as the Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College, and he received an Honorary Doctor of Arts in 2024.
About BlackStar Projects
BlackStar Projects creates the spaces and resources needed to uplift the work of Black, Brown and Indigenous artists working outside the confines of genre. Beyond the annual film festival the organization produces year-round programs, including film screenings, exhibitions, a filmmaker seminar, a film production lab and a journal of film, art and visual culture. BlackStar is working towards a liberatory world in which a vast spectrum of Black, Brown and Indigenous experiences is irresistibly celebrated in arts and culture.
Accessibility Options: Amplified Audio, please see the box office for devices.