​Black Film as Protest: Donovan Gardener

​Join us for the return of the Black Film as Protest screening series! We're launching a new season focused on radical filmmakers from the global diaspora, starting with a special evening featuring Donovan Gardener.

​​Screening:
NOISE GATE
AAACC (African American Art & Culture Complex)
Friday, May 98 2026
6P (Doors open)
630P (Screening starts)
Free Community Screening
Filmmaker in person

​NOISE GATE
NOISE GATE is an experimental sci-fi short film about a dimensional traveling Scientist who is in search of the ultimate reality. His only passage into that realm is something called the NOISE GATE.
Trailer

​About the Filmmaker
Donovan J. Gardener (he/they) is an award-winning filmmaker and director of photography based in Los Angeles. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, Gardener’s work spans narrative, documentary, and speculative cinema, with a particular focus on science fiction as a site for cultural memory, political imagination, and alternative futures.

​Their films frequently center Black, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ subjectivities, engaging questions of care, labor, intimacy, and survival through formally grounded, collaborative modes of production. Gardener’s practice treats cinema as both an archival and speculative tool, blending naturalistic performance with genre frameworks to interrogate how marginalized communities navigate time, belonging, and futurity.

​In addition to their independent and experimental work, Gardener has contributed to projects supported by platforms such as Netflix and HBO. They are the founder of StoryGarden Creative Agency, an artist-led production practice committed to access, authorship, and the cultivation of visual storytelling ecosystems for underrepresented communities

​About the BlackMaria Microcinema
The BlackMaria is a 40-seat brick-and-mortar space in San Francisco dedicated to cinema as study, discourse, and disruption. At its core is a cinema lens framework rooted in decolonization and abstract thinking, utilizing RDA (Rooted in Decolonization and Abstract Thinking).

​Venue Details:
AAACC (African American Arts & Culture Complex)
762 Fulton St.
San Francisco

​Details:

• ​Date: Friday, May 8, 2026

• ​Doors at 6:00 PM

• ​Screening at 6:30 PM

• ​Free