Presented by Imani Dennison, Rea Tajiri, and Zac Manuel

Presented in collaboration with Points North Institute, the North Star Fellowship supports four innovative Black, Brown and Indigenous media artists and filmmakers who are developing projects that span the latitudes of creative nonfiction. The fellows will present the projects they have been working on during their fellowship period. 

Imani Dennison I Mississippi Mud in Spring

Mississippi Mud in Spring is a hybrid documentary that weaves speculative narrative with documentary realism, exploring the legacy of a Southern Black family and the waterways that bridge ancestral memory, diasporic imagination, and survival. This project is both a reflective meditation on diasporic imagination and an intimate historical document of Mississippi’s rural South. Grounded in a short story by the filmmaker’s late grandmother, Colia Liddell Lafayette Clark—a Southern-born civil rights activist—the film explores the intersections of ancestral memory, Black survival, and collective creativity.

Zac Manuel I The Instrument

The Instrument follows three generations of the Manuel family—the filmmaker, his father, Phillip, and his grandfather, Vernon—through their intertwined musical legacy. From the New Orleans jazz scene to big tech data centers, the film explores whether AI can recreate someone’s essence post-mortem and asks: Can artificial intelligence heal old wounds? The Instrument investigates memory, grief, mortality, and AI’s potential to redefine legacy and bridge generational gaps through music and technology.

Rea Tajiri I NonAlien

In 1946, an unemployed Nikkei photographer wanders the streets of Chicago, searching for community through the viewfinder of his camera. On a strip of beach bordering Lake Michigan, he encounters Paul Robeson, Hisaye Yamamoto, Sun Ra, along with his three children who have yet to be born. In the future he will find work as the founding photo editor for Playboy Magazine. In the present, he spends his days surrounded by the spirits of his past and future worlds. In this speculative documentary, filmmaker Rea Tajiri examines the phantom nature of citizenship through the history of the Japanese American Resettlement in Chicago, via the writing and documentary photography left behind by her father, photojournalist Vince Tajiri. This will be a presentation of research elements with questions for the audience.

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