For nearly three decades, the American Black Film Festival (ABFF) has served as a barometer of where African American storytelling is headed. ABFF Honors, the festival’s annual awards-season gala, has become its most visible statement about who is shaping that future, drawing a cross-generational roster of talent that has recently included Javicia Leslie, Jeffrey Wright, Jimmy Akingbola, Kenny Lattimore, Lance Gross, LisaRaye McCoy, Michael Jai White, Naturi Naughton, Tai Beauchamp, Terrence Howard, Terrence J, Tia Mowry, and Tika Sumpter. This year’s ceremony will take place on Monday, Feb. 16, at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, with press check-in at 4:30 p.m. and red-carpet arrivals from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m.
Founded in 2016, the ceremony was created to recognize Black excellence in film and television, and to spotlight artists whose work and advocacy have expanded the avenues for African American talent in Hollywood. ABFF Honors is an extension of a project Jeff Friday began in 1997, when he launched the ABFF to address a persistent gap in the industry: African American filmmakers and actors, he argued, deserved the same access to audiences, financiers, and gatekeepers as their white counterparts. Over the years, the festival has done more than simply program films — it has served as an early platform for directors and performers who would go on to studio careers and awards recognition, helping to establish the ABFF as a kind of informal academy for African American creativity.
That history is not background — it is the reason this moment cannot be treated as just another glossy night in awards season. No one in this community needs a lecture about why creators of color matter; that has always been obvious. What 2025, and now, make impossible to ignore is that there is a determined faction in this country working to spin the clock back to a time when open violence against people of color was written into law, culture, and everyday life. In that reality, Hollywood’s failure is not only moral; it is financial malpractice. If this industry insists on calling itself a business — and it does, then it has to own the fact that its business model is broken, because African American storytellers and stories are not a feel-good add-on. They are a proven engine of attention, loyalty, and profit.
Their films and series capture lived experience, history, and inner emotional life that dominant narratives have distorted, erased, or casually strip-mined without credit, preserving cultural memory while shattering old assumptions about who gets to be complicated, tender, joyful, flawed, or heroic on screen. Even after years of corporate “diversity” statements, decision-making power at studios and streamers remains concentrated in white hands, which translates into fewer green lights, smaller marketing budgets, and thinner awards campaigns for African American writers and directors than their artistry and audience pull justify.
Basic equity demands deliberate backing from festivals, funders, journalists, and viewers, not another round of panel discussions. At the same time, audiences have already rendered their verdict: They show up and they pay. African American viewers are among the most loyal, high-frequency consumers of film and television, helping to drive some of the most acclaimed and commercially successful releases of the past decade, while multiracial audiences consistently embrace work centered on African American perspectives when that work is visible.
Analysts on the business side have been blunt: Dismantling structural barriers for underrepresented creators, including African American filmmakers and showrunners, could unlock billions in additional revenue every year. That means supporting them is not charity; it is sound economic strategy and overdue course correction. Among major festivals and streaming platforms, a surge of formally adventurous, globally resonant work by African American artists — from intimate documentaries to genre-bending features — continues to prove that the talent and the audience are already here.
This is a hinge point. Sustained, intentional support can turn what some still dismiss as a “moment” into a permanent recalibration, in which African American storytelling is recognized as a load-bearing pillar of American cinema and television. ABFF Honors is where that argument is made in public, on the record, and without apology.