The 33rd annual Philadelphia Film Festival runs October 17-27, 2024 and features over 100 films this year. Most films play twice and our own Justin Nordell will be sharing “Philly Film Fest Fast Reviews” to give you a taste of the festival so you can pick and choose which films to make for the second screenings!
The award-winning Crystal Moselle, director of The Wolfpack and Skate Kitchen, makes her fictional narrative debut with The Black Sea, a fish way out of water tale about Khalid (co-director Derrick B. Harden in his film debut), a constant screwup who makes his way from Brooklyn to Bulgaria for a big payday. He met a woman on Facebook who bought him his ticket and has agreed to pay him $10,000 for… adult time. Unfortunately for Khalid when he arrives in Bulgaria: she’s dead.
The woman who flew him to a foreign country where he doesn’t speak the language with the promise of more money than he’s ever made… passed away mere hours before he got there. To make matters worse, her son is not particularly amused about how and why Khalid has found himself in his dead mother’s home. Out on the streets of Bulgaria with little to no money, Khalid spends his first night sleeping in the bed of a truck. To add injury to insult, when he wakes up in the morning, his bag with his passport has been stolen. He finds his way to the travel agency of Ina (Irmena Chichikova, Viktoria) who tries to help him, but with no passport the best she can do is help him find a job. Ina directs him to none other than… the son of the woman who brought him to Bulgaria in the first place. Taking pity on Khalid, he’s given a series of odd jobs and inexplicably begins to build a better life for himself in Bulgaria than he may ever have had in Brooklyn.
What is so exceptional about The Black Sea, other than watching the charisma magnet that is Derrick B. Harden playing Khalid, is the simple fact that the entire movie… is improvised. The film was shot over the course of only seventeen days with no script and only a basic outline. What Moselle and Harden are able to achieve with no script and only one professional actress (Chichikova) is by no means perfect, but it is nothing short of remarkable.
Grade: B
Catch it at PFF33: Wednesday, October 23rd at 8:30pm at the PFS Bourse
Tickets Available Here: https://prod5.agileticketing.net/websales/pages/ticketsearchcriteria.aspx?evtinfo=429764
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