Welcome back to the thrilling conclusion of my Denton Black Film Festival 2026 coverage!
Saturday
On day three of DBFF, I went to a film festival and tripped and fell into a protest. As I hit the downtown square of Denton, I noticed several hundred people gathered in front of the courthouse. Some were holding signs demanding the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) in the wake of members of that federal agency murdering two peaceful human beings in Minnesota, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, for the crime of exercising their constitutional rights.
I had arrived after the protest got started, having just come from my first screening of the day at Alamo. I had plenty of time to join them before my next screening started. I parked and walked over to add my meat suit to the mass of people making it known that what Donald Trump’s secret police are doing in the name of his fascist regime is unacceptable.
At the anti-ICE protest in Denton (photo by the author)
Best protest sign ever? (photo by the author)
It was a poignant moment considering my next screening. The short film Beyond the Headlines: The NABJ Journey chronicles the founding and history of the National Association of Black Journalists. Currently comprised of over 4200 members, the NABJ was formed in 1975 by 44 founding members as a way to help Black journalists find community and resources in an industry that was – and in many ways still is – dominated by white people.
The 40-minute documentary covers the disgusting episode in 2024 when Trump was interviewed during the NABJ annual conference. You might remember this event as the time our once and future wannabe king pondered out loud in front of a roomful of Black journalists about exactly when and how Kamala Harris “suddenly” became Black. He went on: “I did not know she was Black until a couple of years ago when she happened to turn Black… And now she wants to be known as Black. Is she Indian, or is she Black?” Jesus Fucking Christ, what a piece of shit Donald Trump is.
Aside from that ugly bit of history, Beyond the Headlines chronicles an organization that fights hard to secure Black voices in our media landscape. It’s an inspiring story of a people shut out of positions of power in the media organizing for meaningful change in our white-dominated society.
Beyond the Headlines was paired with another short, Belonging Beyond Brown, which examines the experiences and struggles of Black educators and students in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that (supposedly) ended state-sanctioned segregation in the United States. As the documentary makes painfully clear, segregation didn’t so much end as it morphed into other forms of exclusion.
Racist white people are constantly asking why Black people can’t just “get over” slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and the myriad other ways the Black population has been oppressed in our country. As Belonging Beyond Brown makes clear, they shouldn’t be over it because these systems of oppression have never ended. Each moment of progress for Black people comes with a new round of getting fucked over by the white power structure. The end of slavery led to the Black Codes, which led to Jim Crow, which included segregation, and so on and so on.
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I had almost two hours before my next screening. With the protest wrapped up and gone, I decided to take the opportunity to revisit one of my favorite spots in Denton, one that I visited dozens of times while studying film at the University of North Texas. Recycled Books is a Denton institution, and I ended up grabbing a few books (yes, they were both movie related) and loaded up on stickers – including a logo for Recycled itself, for me – as gifts for my hosts and one for Rae of Tramell Tillman’s Seth Milchick from the Apple TV series Severance with the words “Music Dance Experience” (IYKYK) beneath his image.
After that I stopped into a burger joint on the square named LSA – for Lone Star Attitude – Burger Co. I had the Psychedelic, with sauteed mushrooms, Swiss, leaf lettuce, house mayo, and tomato. Paired with the metric ton of garlic parm fries they served, I was stuffed and ready for my next screening. I want to go back to LSA Burger Co. at some point in order to try the brisket queso. Sounds delicious.
Mural of “The Great Texas Supper” at LSA Burger Co. (photo by the author)
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The next screening was the one I mentioned in my DBFF teaser as the movie I had seen at last year’s DIFF. (Or was it SXSW; I can’t remember). A Portrait of a Postman documents the life of Kermit Oliver, an artist who squeezed in making his unique and beautiful works of art between shifts at the local Post Office in Waco, Texas. The only American artist who has ever been commissioned to create a design for the world-famous Hermès line of scarves, Oliver has known joy and unimaginable tragedy as the documentary details.
We meet Oliver as an art student in Houston, learn about his decision (made with his wife) to move up north to settle in Waco to raise a family, and then we see a family tragedy involving Oliver’s son completely change how the painter expressed himself in his art. A shocking crime, arrest, and eventual death sentence culminate in one of the most personal and painful works the artist has ever produced. (Another work from Oliver puts former Governor of Texas Rick Perry in the spotlight as betraying Christian values of mercy and grace when it comes to clemency from the state for Oliver’s son. Any opportunity to shit all over Rick Perry is welcome from me, and A Portrait of a Postman satisfies that brief.)
Director Christopher Charles Scott’s picture is a probing study of a unique and idiosyncratic artist with a life story as captivating as his art.
Sunday
I only had time for one more screening before I needed to head back south to Dallas. After a short, 15-minute documentary titled The Day You Find Your Name, about the life and struggles of Afeni Shakur – mother of iconic rapper Tupac Shakur – my last screening was of the documentary At the Pan-African Connection.
Pondering the question of the success or failure of the Black liberation movement, director Anthony Asota introduces us to the Pan-African Connection, a bookstore in Dallas that is much more than a place to find a good read. More a community education center and support hub for the local Black community than a bookstore, I was enchanted to learn about this place that Google Maps tells me is a thirteen-minute drive from my house.
The proprietors of Pan-African Connection do everything from helping the hungry in the community by stocking a food pantry – a service that got them ticketed by DPD for not being properly permitted; because feeding hungry people is often criminalized in this country – to holding teach-ins about the idea of Pan-Africanism, I was delighted to get a glimpse of a culture right next door to me but of which I was completely ignorant.
The Denton Black Film Festival was a welcoming celebration of Black excellence and creativity through the art of filmmaking that helped me connect with fellow human beings who have radically different lived experiences than my own. It was a delight to cover DBFF 2026 and it proved to be an excellent way to kick off my film festival coverage for the year.
As much as I enjoyed the fest, I had to cut bait a little early to make it back to my beloved Texas Theatre in time for its ongoing screenings of David Lynch’s groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks. Theaters around the country are currently screening select episodes of the show, and that night’s screenings kicked off season two, after The Texas screened the entirety of the eight-episode first season over the course of the previous month. I learned only last night that enough tickets were sold for seasons one and two that screening season three of the show, known as Twin Peaks: The Return, is almost assured to happen.
As always, thanks for reading.
Movies are neat.