Cinéaste Blaxploration: Why I Became a Black Film Cinephile

I’ll never forget the first time I heard the term Cinéaste Blaxploration come out of Nola Darling’s mouth in the Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It.

It wasn’t just a cute phrase. It felt like a mirror. It gave a name to something I had already been doing without realizing it, in digging deep into Black film, not just to be entertained, but to be expanded. To be seen. To be reminded. Nola didn’t just watch movies; she studied them. She archived emotion, style, and social commentary. Her love of cinema was layered, political, sensual, and sacred. And when she coined Cinéaste Blaxploration—a blend of cinephile energy and Black cultural reclamation—I felt that in my spirit.

That was my origin story, too.

Somewhere between Poetic Justice and Get Out, between indie Black love stories and mainstream mythologies, I realized I wasn’t just watching movies. I was participating in a lineage. A ritual. A resistance. A record.

Because being a Black cinephile isn’t just about loving film.

It’s about paying attention.

It’s about really looking at how we’re represented—or how we’re not—in mainstream media.

Who gets to be soft? Who gets to be free? Who gets to be weird, wild, in love, in danger, in peace?

Becoming a Black film cinephile isn’t about elitism—it’s about curiosity. It's about peeling back the layers of what Blackness looks like on screen and off. It’s about chasing the sacred through scripts, symbolism, and scenes that feel like home, or warnings or dreams. Not every film is perfect. Not every story speaks for all of us. But through each frame, I get closer to understanding where we’ve been—and imagining where we might go.

Black Film & How We Deal with Trauma

For us, storytelling has always been a survival tool.
Sometimes we process grief through a mother’s tears on screen.
Sometimes we process rage through horror, through sci-fi, through surrealism.
And sometimes, we laugh. Loud. Raw. Deep from the belly.

Comedy is medicine.

It’s how we name the pain without letting it consume us. It’s how we clown systems that try to oppress us. It’s how we take control of the narrative—how we say, "Yeah, this sht is wild… but I’m still here, and I still got jokes. "Whether it’s slapstick, satire, or shade, Black comedy makes room for truth and tension to exist at the same time. And that’s sacred.

Being a Black cinephile isn’t escapism—it’s sacred witnessing. Black film gives us a container to hold our pain without being swallowed by it. To cry for what we never got. To rage for what was stolen. To laugh out loud anyway. To see that we're still here. To remember that surviving is not the only plotline—we deserve joy, experimentation, softness, weirdness, and wit too.