O+, a festival empowering communities to take control of their collective wellbeing through the exchange of art, music, and wellness–has announced the annual O+ Festival Kingston lineup, starting October 8, 2021.
Among its programming, the event consists of a screening of Street Heroines, helmed by Valiant Pictures director Alexandra Henry.
The festival will emphasize outdoor venues and public art and follow the updated public health guidance in place at that time around masking, social distance, and capacity. Through the generosity of many supporters, the festival will be free to the public. The O+ Festival celebrates life, through the exchange of art, music and wellness, while holding space for the complexity that comes with the collective, and personal, the trauma of the past year. It offers joy and connection which are, like oxygen–the festival theme this year–essential to our ability to thrive as a community.
The feature-length film Street Heroines celebrates the courage and creativity of female street artists worldwide. Following three Latina protagonists, Street Heroines is the first of its kind documentary to capture the global outcry of female street artists who have been overlooked for decades, while their male counterparts continue to garner acclaim. Setting out to raise the profiles of women in this growing subculture, the film follows these emerging artists from different corners of the world who use their art to fight inequality.
Two artists featured in the documentary, Lady Pink and Ann J. Lewis, will also be creating murals for the festival, celebrating women and the highly influential Latinx community in Kingston.
REELated: Beam, Museum of Graffiti sponsor Street Heroines
Street Heroines aligns with the O+ endeavor to spotlight women and women-identifying femme artists in traditionally male-dominated spaces. The organization has been working for the past 12 years to bring public art to Kingston, NY, and other festival cities around the country, believing that art is medicine and that experiencing and engaging with art can be tremendously healing.
Notes O+ Festival Art Director Lindsey Wolkowicz, “O+ has had a woman in the role of Art Director for over a decade, which is awesome. As a result, we’ve worked hard to prioritize femme-identified voices, particularly POC femme-identified voices. A lot of the womxn who have contributed murals through O+, like those in Street Heroines, have talked about the reclamation of space enacted through making work in the street. Even seeing the trailer, it was so moving to feel like what we are doing is connected to the stories of the powerful women in the film.”
Director Alexandra Henry is a multilingual director with over 13 years of international experience in film and branded entertainment. She has been selected for SHOOT Magazine’s lauded New Directors Showcase and was named a finalist for the STARZ & The Wrap Women’s ‘Telling Our Stories’ film contest, demonstrating her passion for art, music, and languages through photography. The majority-female Street Heroines filmmaking team includes Producer Jordan Noël Hawkes and Executive Producer Zahra Sherzad and is presented in partnership with Some Serious Business and with support from New York Foundation for the Arts.
Street Heroines will screen on the evening of October 8 at 7:30 PM. Click HERE to view the O+ program.
