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Black Friday, a new annual short film series unrelated to post-Turkey Day shopping, returns for its second year on Friday, Nov. 8, at the Hollywood with stories focused on home and the stories of elders. Richard Brown, an author, activist and former Portland Observer photographer, will receive the Black Rose Laureate Award in recognition of his career as part of Black Friday’s non-movie programming, which includes a financial discussion panel and an independent market by members of the Black United Fund’s Emerging Entrepreneur Program.
“There’s another story to be told here about Black Portland and resistance and reclaiming our spaces in this city,” Black Friday producer Donovan Scribes says. “It feels like a natural narrative to be telling, and a narrative that’s going to be good for people in this city to see, and beyond that.”
Scribes and fellow producers Zoe Piliafas and Elizabeth Stock and filmmaker Devin Boss organized Black Friday last year to share the stories of elder Black Portlanders. Boss’ short film Geneva, A Woman wrote a love letter for Paul Knauls, the mayor of Northeast Portland, to his late wife. This year, Scribes wrote a letter in the voice of his mentor and president during his own vice presidency with Portland’s NAACP chapter. He called these undertakings, the Elder Anthologies series, “one of the highest honors of my career and life.”
“There’s still an unfortunately short story around civil rights-era people who were pushing forward,” Scribes says. “We have this limited scope of Malcolm, Martin, something about Harriet way back then, and jump into what’s happening now and having some context around how they helped to make things better. But as someone who went to school here, I didn’t get a lot of context around people who have laid the groundwork right here in Oregon, in Portland.”
For the ongoing Where We Goin’ series, which premiered at last year’s Black Friday in September, Boss also filmed the Portland artist Intisar Abioto as she curated Black Artists of Oregon—an expansive survey of Black Oregonian artists staged at Portland Art Museum last year—and as her family of accomplished artists prepared to purchase a home once belonging to Beatrice Morrow Cannady, in order to turn The Advocate’s editor’s home into a historic site, which ultimately went to another private buyer.
“A lot of these things don’t live at Oregon Historical Society—no shade to them, they do a lot of good stuff—they might live in old photo albums at our grandma’s house, because what we’ve chosen as a city to make the dominant stories aren’t ours,” Scribes says. “They’re not the primary stories being lifted up to where you can just point down the street and say you can get our history in the same way,” Scribes says.
Another film will explore the Albina Vision Trust’s ongoing efforts to restore Black Portland’s presence in North and Northeast neighborhoods, two areas families were displaced from in the mid-20th century.
“These stories can’t be lost, and we lose something important if we lose them,” Boss says.
Sai Stone and Elijah Hasan, the latter of whom exhibited in Black Artists of Oregon, will show photos and sell prints at the Hollywood Theatre for the event. Abioto and AVT executive director Winta Yohannes will also discuss home finances live with Microenterprise Services of Oregon executive director Cobi Lewis. The financial talks, like the program’s theme of home, also serves to further share stories, whether artistically though film or pragmatically through mortgage talk.
“Stories are some of the most powerful tools of social, cultural, even spiritual orientation,” Boss says. “If we don’t have true control over those narratives—I think they really inform our behavior, or we don’t have the ability to be rooted in stories that help form our sense of self and help push us toward where we are going.”
SEE IT: Black Friday at Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 6:30 pm Friday, Nov. 8. $25.