Black Things Today: Proof of Concept

A film by Johnaé Strong

Some works capture the beauty of Black life.
Others hold its tension, its memory, its muscle.
This one does all of that—and then breathes into it.

Black Things Today, directed by Johnaé Strong, is a cinematic offering rooted in presence, ritual, and return. Told through the lives of three alumni of Chicago’s Betty Shabazz International Charter School, the film traces how young Black people carry the philosophies, language, and spirit of a Pan-African education long after the last school bell. It is a story about what we inherit, and what we choose to continue.

There is no spectacle here. No explanation.
Instead, the camera invites you to sit still. To look again.
To watch what happens when Black people are given the space to reflect, to remember, to simply be.

The school—known by many as “the Village”—has for decades shaped students not just through curriculum, but through ceremony. It instills principles that stretch beyond the classroom: self-determination, cultural reverence, collective responsibility. This isn’t a film about a school. It’s about how a school becomes a spine. About how memory is passed through language, through song, through the daily acts of care that get carried into adulthood.

The three former students in this film are not performing insight. They are standing in it. They speak about elders and mantras, the feeling of being truly seen, and the responsibility of continuation. Their lives serve as a kind of embodied archive—reminding us that education, when rooted in community and cultural clarity, doesn’t end at graduation. It lingers. It shapes the way you enter a room. It shapes the way you hold a camera, a conversation, your own grief.

Johnaé Strong does not approach this work as a detached filmmaker. She is a mother, an organizer, a former educator, and a student of abolitionist practice. Her lens is grounded in love and in trust. The way she frames stillness, breath, and movement makes it clear that she isn’t trying to capture Black life from the outside. She’s listening from within.

The film moves slowly on purpose. It gives language to things that often go unnamed: the soft tension in a shoulder, the choice to speak with care, the weight of walking through a city that has taken so much and still offers something worth staying for.

There are no declarations about what Chicago is. There is no final word on what the Village has meant. What we are given instead is a glimpse into what it means to be shaped by a tradition that values your existence as sacred. A glimpse into how young people metabolize love and grief and legacy—and turn it into something new.

Black Things Today is not asking for applause.
It is offering a kind of permission.
To remember differently.
To document with tenderness.
To move like the past is still watching.

In Chicago, where survival is often framed as success, this film opens another possibility: that Black life, when nurtured by community, can stretch beyond endurance. It can stretch into practice. Into vision. Into something that does not need to be explained, only carried forward.