BlackStar Film Festival 2025’s Abolish! Shorts examine the carceral state and imagine a better future
August 18, 2025
Movie Jawn: “…
Space to Breathe
Directed by Juicebox P. Burton
North American Premiere
The most experimental of the Abolish! Shorts program, Space to Breathe has a speculative Afrofuturist framing, projecting a world where prisons and police were abolished in 2036 (news presented with a ticker also mentions Florida land loss and the surrender of a fascist militia). Three young people—Aaron Garrett’s M04R, Porsche Kemp’s Namu, and Nish Newton’s Sojourner—are meeting in 2070 with their android/hologram Storian (Roger Guevner Smith), a humanoid encyclopedia, to commemorate Abolition Day with a digital time capsule, a transmission to the future. They recall abolitionist and anti-carceral activists in the 20th- and 21st-century U.S. through archival footage, with Robert Saleem Holbrook (Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, who also features in A New Voice) and George Jackson among the many featured….”