Next month’s Newark LGBTQ Film Festival, with a full slate of films made by and featuring queer people of color, will have live performances, film screenings, and a new fellowship opportunity named in honor of Sakia Gunn, a Black lesbian teen whose murder in downtown Newark in May of 2003 outraged the local community.
Kicking off May 1, the Newark LGBTQ Film Festival is entering its third year — and the 2025 festival will showcase three feature films and more than two-dozen short films.
“Now more than ever, it’s crucial we share our experiences — our triumphs, our struggles — and give underrepresented voices the spotlight they deserve,” Denise Hinds, a 2022 Gay City News Impact Award recipient who chairs the Newark LGBTQ Film Festival, said in a written statement. “This festival is vital to the queer community in Newark and beyond. It is a powerful reminder that our stories matter and need to be seen.”
The opening night’s film is the thriller “Ponyboi,” which takes place on Valentine’s Day and follows a young intersex sex worker who works at a New Jersey laundromat alongside his pregnant best friend, Angel, but a troubling turn creates new challenges and a mysterious cowboy enters the picture.
On Friday night, attendees can join a free reception at Express Newark at 54 Halsey St. in Newark beginning 5:30 p.m. There will be drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and “beats by a Newark based DJ, a special screening of the music video ‘From the Ground Up,’ and ballroom kids putting their vogueing on full display,” according to the film festival’s website.
The evening will continue at 6:30 p.m. with a screening of the Friday night feature, “The Ball,” which is a documentary about the underground ballroom scene in early 1970s New York City. A panel discussion will follow, along with an 8:30 p.m. “Date Night Shorts Program” featuring several LGBTQ-themed short films.
The festival continues with a full day on Saturday. Attendees can join filmmakers for a free meet and greet lunch at 11:30 a.m. at Express Newark. After an afternoon packed with short films, there will be a free awards ceremony at 5 p.m.
At 6 p.m. will be the Sakia Gunn Legacy Fellowship Presentation. Newark LGBTQ Film Festival, in collaboration with Express Newark’s Community Media Center and Paramount’s Content for Change, created the Sakia Gunn Legacy Filmmaking Fellowship. This year’s awardees, Odessa Whitlock and Erby Beauvil, received $5,000 production grants from Paramount’s Content for Change, in addition to mentorship, production equipment, and more. The presentation will show the awardees’ short films.
The evening will conclude with an 8 p.m. feature documentary film called “A Mother Apart,” which is about a mother who seeks out her own birth mother who abandoned her as a baby and learns revealing details about her family history.
The final day of the festival, May 4, will take place at the NJIT Jim Wise Theater at 100 Summit St. in Newark, beginning with a collection of short films from young filmmakers called “To Be Young, Gifted & Queer.” The festival will end with an afternoon block of shorts called “Identities in Motion,” which explore the “the fluidity of identity, love, and resilience through diverse queer narratives,” according to the festival’s site.
The third annual edition of the Newark Film Festival comes 22 years to the month after Gunn, 15, was killed while traveling home with four friends after an outing in Greenwich Village. While waiting for a New Jersey Transit bus in downtown Newark, the girls rejected sexual advances by Richard McCullough and Allen Pierce and informed them they were lesbians. The men attacked the teens, and when Gunn tried to help her friend who was being choked, McCullough stabbed Gunn in the chest. Gunn died in the arms of her best friend, Valencia Bailey, just two weeks before she would have turned 16. Gunn’s murder was covered extensively by Gay City News.
In a sign of just how much Gunn’s murder galvanized the local community, nearly 3,000 young people attended her funeral.
In May of 2023, about 40 people gathered to mark the 20th anniversary of Gunn’s death and to celebrate a mural memorializing her along McCarter Highway in Newark. That same year, Academy Street in downtown Newark was renamed Sakia Gunn Way in Gunn’s memory.
To get tickets or learn more about the festival, click here.
