This article is part of a column called Philly Profiles, which features in-depth profiles of local moving-image artists and cultural workers, including their body of work, inspirations, and upcoming projects. The column is written by cinéSPEAK Philly Cultural Critics Fellows.
Filmmaker and film promoter Michael J. Dennis has always been searching for stories worth telling. A lifelong Philadelphia resident and a driving force behind the local film community, Dennis’s love for film started when he was a child.
“It all started because I would stay up late watching movies—this was before the internet,” Dennis recalls over Zoom with cinéSPEAK. “So you would have reference books like Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide and The Film Encyclopedia, and those were the books I would go to sleep with—The Film Encyclopedia was my pillow when I was 10, 12 years old.”
Poring over film books from a young age landed Dennis a job at what today seems like a prehistoric place: the video store. “I started working at a video store when I was 13, which gave me an encyclopedic knowledge of movies,” Dennis explains. Between that and maintaining stellar grades throughout high school, Dennis’s next step was to apply to film school.
“When I was in high school, I wasn’t even thinking about color or race,” Dennis reflects. “I just loved John Hughes movies, and I wanted to make movies that reflected my experience. Around the same time, Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch came out, and I already knew about Martin Scorsese—so applying to NYU just made sense.”
Being in New York in the ‘90s allowed Dennis to immerse himself in the groundbreaking pop culture of the time. “When I was in college at NYU, we went on a field trip to see The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, and it opened up a whole universe for me,” Dennis says. “Seeing that on stage and Def Comedy Jam, listening to hip hop like De La Soul, and all the Afrocentric stuff that was popping around at the time was really important.”
After graduating from NYU and the American Film Institute, Dennis directed films such as Who Is Chris Rock?, Philly Boy: A Movie About M.C. Breeze, and Ursula Rucker: Poet. A well-regarded Black creative, Dennis has collaborated with and earned praise from figures including Dick Gregory, Gil Scott-Heron, Seth Gilliam, and Ava DuVernay. His documentary short The 13th Amendment—which followed his 90-year-old great-grandmother’s trip to vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 Pennsylvania primary—won awards from CNN and PhillyCAM.
“Being from Philadelphia, I’m not really interested in using my energy to tell stories that everybody else is telling,” Dennis says. “My overall mission is to rediscover lost artifacts of our culture, and to promote empowering people.” Expanding on how the city has shaped his career, Dennis credits Philly’s affordable cost of living and strong community. “I’m very fortunate and grateful for what Philly has done for me in the sense that it’s a great place for artists to really explore their gifts, and there are a lot of talented people that just want to share those gifts.”
Dennis’s love for Philadelphia, combined with the lack of film programming celebrating Black cinema, inspired him to found Reelblack in 2003—the city’s first showcase for African American film. Active for 15 years, Reelblack ran monthly community screenings that helped introduce local audiences to a new wave of Black storytelling. Despite the series’s eclectic approach, in-person screenings became harder to promote with the advent of streaming.
“It’s a lot of work, as you can imagine, to promote one event, and then if it rains, nobody shows up, and you work a whole month for basically $50, right?” explains Dennis. “We stopped the screenings in 2019, but not because of the pandemic. We were just getting more attention from our YouTube channel.”
Alongside in-person screenings, Dennis launched Reelblack on YouTube, showcasing his vast archive of rare films, interviews, and music videos. “I just started putting my inventory on YouTube, and it blew up. We reached over a million subscribers during the pandemic,” says Dennis. Tapping into vintage films, commercials, and seminars, Reelblack’s YouTube channel became an invaluable archive of Black history and culture. “It opened up a whole new galaxy of people that have never been exposed to us because they don’t live in Philly. So that was a good thing, to feel that kind of love.”
The channel’s rise ended abruptly when YouTube demonetized it for “reused content” and warned of a possible takedown. “We were promoting Black empowerment…So it literally came down to ‘All right, do you want to continue to get a check? Or do you want more people to see this Malcolm X video that otherwise would be lost to time?’ So we moved the original content to Reelblack 2, keeping the first channel as a monument to lost Black ephemera.”
While the loss of a platform as popular as Reelblack 1 was a setback, Reelblack 2 brought Dennis the chance to produce new content: original interviews with Black comedians, musicians, and educators, alongside shorts and podcasts where Dennis’s humor and love of movies really come alive.
“It’s ironic, but everything happens for a reason. If we hadn’t faced the shutdown, I wouldn’t be teaching at Temple,” Dennis reflects. He has been channeling his passion and expertise into his role as an adjunct instructor at Temple University since 2023, teaching courses such as History of Independent Film and Race and Ethnicity in Film. “I’ve been talking about Black film since I was 20. This is what I live, breathe, and love,” he adds.
A tireless advocate for the arts, Dennis isn’t slowing down anytime soon. After a five year hiatus, Reelblack is relaunching in-person screenings in Philadelphia. This new chapter includes acquiring the rights to restore and distribute the ‘90s action film Riverbend—“the best movie you’ll see that you never heard of,” Dennis says.
“Watching it blew me away because one of the things we talk about on my channel is self-reliance and empowerment, and Riverbend is a rare film in that it shows Black people standing up for one another. It shows Black people teaching and training one another to fight for their rights,” says Dennis. With Riverbend, Dennis hopes for Reelblack to reemerge as “a legitimate distribution platform for Black independent film.”
Tying in his work as a YouTube host with his pedigree as a filmmaker, historian, and archivist of Black cinema, Dennis touches on an idea he picked up when he was young: “KRS-One said, ‘It’s all Black.’ It’s like, you can’t separate the highest culture from the lowest culture. It’s all Black. It all comes from Black. You can see I got Welcome Home Brother Charles, which is a ghetto ass movie, or stuff from somebody who made movies in the UCLA rebellion, and then I got Coming to America here as well. So you know, I just love being Black sometimes. ‘Cause I get to say, ‘Hey, we did this.’
As our conversation wound down, I asked Dennis what brings him joy. “Riverbend. That’s the joy in my life right now. Turning people onto new stuff,” Dennis says. He takes another moment to sit with the question. “What brings me joy?” Dennis repeats. “The thought that there’s a tomorrow, really. You know, that tomorrows can be better. ‘Cause I’m holding onto something good, you know.”
*Featured Image: Image of Michael Dennis. Photo credit: David Mialetti of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Maria “Nenet” Barrios is an Argentine-born and Philadelphia-based writer and music journalist. Specializing in storytelling that spans decades of Latin music, her work has been featured in publications including The Washington Post, Bandcamp Daily, and Grammy.com. Nenet is a 2025 cinéSPEAK Philly Cultural Critics Fellow.
