2026 festival theme - The Sound of Us

This year, we’re creating a festival experience to feel energy together. The 2026 Seattle Black Film Festival honors and highlights the soundscapes that have carried our communities—on screen and beyond it. Get ready to experience movies that pulse with Black music, creativity, and resilience. Prepare to take in the sounds and vibrations, absorb them in community, and carry that feeling with you wherever you go next.

About SBFF
The annual Seattle Black Film Festival (formerly the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival – LHAAFF) is a major season program of LANGSTON, showing provocative films and works about the Black experience from independent filmmakers.

For more than twenty years, the festival has been bringing stories and experiences by and about Black people to the big screen in the heart of Seattle’s historically Black neighborhood. Housed at the historic Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, the festival features film screenings, hands-on workshops, panel discussions, and in-depth chats with filmmakers, industry professionals and local community leaders.

As Seattle grows as a seat of activism, progressive ideology, innovation and technology, the Seattle Black Film Festival is a hub for filmmakers and audiences to exchange ideas with Black film as a catalyst for discussion.

The event is the culmination of a year’s worth of community-building through a series of smaller events and partnerships that provide audiences with unique cinematic and cultural opportunities, resulting in the community-wide film festival. The festival focuses on established names and emerging talent in Black media and connecting audiences with filmmakers and filmmaking through interactions in and outside the theater.

Films are selected from entries screened by panels and curated from current and vintage offerings. The festival takes pride in showcasing independent film celebrating Black brilliance, from emerging and established filmmakers in Washington and around the world. This unique film festival connects filmmakers and the community.