After a month of gathering in West Philly’s Clark Park for Under the Stars, cinéSPEAK is adding the “period” to this year’s festival in grand fashion. All of Philadelphia is invited to bring your whole selves, your family, and your friends to see the power of Black queer excellence in Assembly. The night will include a screening of the film and a set from local ballroom legend DJ Delish.
The documentary Assembly was created over seven years as a collaboration between co-directors Rashaad Newsome and Johnny Symons. The foundation of the film is Newsome’s artistic vision and history. A multidisciplinary artist, Newsome was commissioned to create an expansive display at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. What he produced was a celebration of Black queer existence at Black diasporic, gender, and technological intersections. The exhibition included visual art, performance, community classes, a hologram, and video presented over three weeks in 2022. The film documents the creation of the exhibition, also titled Assembly, and the accompanying performance.
Newsome knew going in that documenting such a complex process would require thinking beyond the confines of the traditional documentary film.
“From the beginning, I knew Assembly [the film] would be an ambitious and emotionally layered project–one that would blur the line between documentary and speculative fiction,” Newsome tells cinéSPEAK. This layered vision required a collaborator willing to lean into the complexity, vulnerability, and beauty of what Newsome was creating. “That’s when Johnny Symons came into the picture. As he got to know me and the project, there was a natural alignment.” According to Newsome, with Symons, “I felt I could trust him–with my vulnerability, my community, and the evolving vision for the film.”
Johnny Symons is an experienced documentary filmmaker, who is perhaps best known for co-producing the Academy Award-nominated feature Long Night’s Journey Into Day (2000). For Symons, making Assembly called for a commitment to both the process and the people involved. “It required a lot of patience, trust, and creative flexibility,” Symons tells cinéSPEAK. “As we blended Rashaad’s stunning artistic sensibility and expansive imagination with my focus on intimate and authentic documentary storytelling, we found ourselves building a hybrid work that didn’t have a clear blueprint.”
For cinéSPEAK founder and executive director Sarah Mueller, Assembly is the perfect culminating film for Under the Stars 2025. After twelve years, Mueller is still excited about the organization’s daring to bring films like Assembly to the community. Screening films in this way remains vital to her because you never know the power a story may have on someone’s life. Assembly speaks directly to what she hopes cinéSPEAK brings to the Philly arts and film community. “One thing that I love about Assembly and Rashaad Newsome’s piece is…that he’s about world building,” says Mueller. “He’s about future building, and that is what we, in our small way at cinéSPEAK, are trying to be about in terms of how we use film to contribute to movement work in arts and culture.”
Screening the film in Philly means a great deal to Newsome, who credits the city with aiding in one of his most important artistic achievements. “Working with Kevin JZ Prodigy, the legendary voice of ballroom and a Philly native, has been one of the most transformative partnerships of my career,” he says. “In 2019, we brought the Champion Ball to life [in Philly]–an electric, affirming night that honored the brilliance of Black and Brown queer communities–and these scenes are included in the film. That energy is part of Assembly, and it feels deeply meaningful to return now, in a moment when so much feels unstable, to share this work with the very people who helped shape it.”
With Assembly, Newsome and Symons position themselves in conversation with historic Black queer films like Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied and poets like Assotto Saint and Essex Hemphill. These artists audaciously showed the world the depth and nuance of the lives of Black gay men during the HIV epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s; they planted the garden that Assembly blooms out of.
Symons credits the Emmy Award-winning Riggs specifically as an essential building block for his creative practice. “When I moved to San Francisco as a young gay man, I met Marlon Riggs and he became an inspiration for my documentary work,” he says. “As honoring ancestors and fallen leaders emerged as a theme in Assembly, including a clip from Tongues Untied felt not just appropriate, but critically important. It reinforced the [value of] cross-generational Black queer conversations that build connections between past, present, and future.”
For Newsome, these men are part of the core of who he is. “The inclusion of Marlon, Assotto, and Essex was not only intentional, it was sacred. They are foundational,” he says. “Tongues Untied showed us that formal innovation and political urgency could–and must–coexist. I wanted Assembly to be in direct conversation with that lineage while pushing the form forward…These were men who dared to speak, to love, to create in the face of erasure.”
Erasure is not on the table if cinéSPEAK has anything to say about it. According to Mueller, “You are planting seeds with the hope that the fractals, the ripples, spill over to future iterations of oneself and communities, but also generations.”
Assembly shows us that bearing witness to someone’s life has power. It can inspire us and encourage us to view our lives and the world around us differently, ensuring our histories live long after we have gone. As Assembly builds on a lineage from the past and dreams of the future, we are reminded of a comforting truth: Black queer and trans people are never ending.
Attend the screening of Assembly at cinéSPEAK Under the Stars on Friday, June 13 (Rain Date: Saturday, June 14) at Clark Park. Admission is free, but you can register and get more information here.
*Featured Image: Image of Assembly dancers at Park Avenue Armory, performing a piece choreographed by Maleek Washington. Photo credit: Stephanie Berger.
Johnnie Ray Kornegay III (Jay Ray) is the Deputy Director of Strategy and Impact for Counter Narrative Project. The Chester, PA-based creative is a photographer, writer, and podcast consultant who co-hosts Queue Points, the Ambie Award-nominated podcast that drops the needle on Black music history.
