Film: 2026 San Francisco Black Film Festival

Watch a special selection of films from the San Francisco Black Film Festival celebrating African American Cinema since 1998. 

Doors open at 12:30 (all films are not rated) 

1:00 pm - 1:08 pm – Joshua Tree Part 2  

A meditative six-minute short film rooted in the wisdom that death teaches us the meanings of love. Centered on two Black queer lovers, it reimagines Black death as a beautiful dark portal, a sacred return shaped by how one has lived. Time moves like memory and spirals as the lovers share their first and last conversation, a single six-minute exchange that feels like a lifetime. Joshua Tree is an elegy, and it is our offering, a remembering of Black death as beautiful and of love as a reverent act. 

1:09 pm - 1:15 pm – Dance of the Heroes 

A first-generation Rwandan American boy finds himself caught between the culture of his family and the pressures of American life, until a crisis forces him to embrace his roots in a way that transforms him. 

1:16 pm - 1:38 pm – The Neighbors 

When three neighbors travel to Amsterdam for an award ceremony, their comical journey brings unexpected revelations along the way. 

1:39 pm - 1:49 pm – The Man Who Killed Jim Crow  

The Man Who Killed Jim Crow is a mini documentary celebrating the life and accomplishments of Charles Hamilton Houston, a prominent African American lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP first special counsel. Houston is responsible for developing strategies, in nearly every civil rights case, in the all-out legal assault and eventual dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Beginning in the 1930s, Houston organized a legal team including, his protege, Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter, Oliver Hill and other black attorneys who fought and won numerous cases before the Supreme Court. 

1:50 pm - 2:00 pm – Intermission  

2:00 pm - 2:37 pm – Beyond Blood  

In Beyond Blood, filmmaker and poet Tiffany Fuller retraces her life through the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood, unraveling the complexities of identity, family, and love beyond blood ties. Raised by her aunt in the foster care system, Tiffany grapples with the haunting legacy of drug addiction, an absent mother and less than perfect figures claiming to be her fathers. As she navigates the streets of Bayview, her family's home for generations and the former epicenter of San Francisco's Black community, the documentary becomes an emotional exploration of shared experiences, resilience, and the universal yearning for love and belonging in the face of abandonment. 

2:38 pm - 2:58 pm – The Jones Twins: Bebop 

This short memoir documentary uses original archival footage and current-day interviews to dip into the family origins and performance career of the Jones Twins. Writer-performers who blended comedy, music, and spoken word into an afro-futuristic soup, The Jones Twins defied conventions while influencing the experimental performance scene of the 90s, a time of fertile Black creativity in Brooklyn. 

3:00 pm - 3:45 pm – Filmmaker Q+A