BIPOC Film Program: Black Genre and Horror Films

Wes Andres Goodrich was a finalist in our inaugural BIPOC Filmmaker Fellowship. Goodrich is a Brooklyn-bred writer/director. Since graduating from Columbia University’s MFA Film Program, he has been on the festival circuit with his two shorts: Speak Up Brotha!, a musical romance in the style of ’90s Black films, and Palm Sunday, a southern gothic film about a Jamaican man attempting to assimilate into an all-white church in 1970s Raleigh, North Carolina, which won the Short Film Grand Prize at the Calgary International Film Festival. He is currently working on a short film, Meal Ticket, for Hillman Grad’s Rising Voices Fellowship, which will premiere at Tribeca this June, and he was selected by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the 2023 New Faces of Film.

Goodrich feels the best directors are great samplers, knowing the lineage their movie exists within and recontextualizing visual ideas to say something new and unique. As a filmmaker, he is drawn to the 1970s Black genre films that lock you firmly in the subjective world of the protagonists and horror and thriller films that are uniquely situated to talk directly about societal anxieties, particularly of underrepresented communities. Following a screening of his short films Speak Up Brotha! and Palm Sunday, Wes will be joined by Jim Steele of WSNC Radio to discuss how genre films connect across cultures and time and inspire his filmmaking.