Four hundred industry professionals gathered in Toronto to build community, celebrate Black creativity, and chart a course for the stories and the industry they are determined to shape.
 

 

There is a particular electricity in a room where 400 people feel, simultaneously, that they belong. That was the atmosphere at the Toronto Region Board of Trade on April 7, when the Black Screen Office held its third annual Symposium, a day-long gathering of producers, directors, writers, commissioners, financiers, and emerging creators from across Canada and beyond, the majority of them Black.

 

 

The event opened with Joan Jenkinson, BSO co-founder and CEO, setting the terms of the day with characteristic clarity. She began with a story about content creator Tope Babalola, who built an audience of two million on TikTok and parlayed it into a sold-out premiere of his second short film at the TIFF Lightbox. "Someone builds an audience on his own terms with hard work and walks into one of the most recognized film institutions in the world, and people are there to see his work," Jenkinson told the room. "That's not luck, that's strategy."

 

 

The strategy imperative was paired with sober honesty about the current landscape. Jenkinson acknowledged that Black creatives who gained access to the industry over the past several years are now being "quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, told to get back in line." She framed the Symposium's mission as a response to that pressure: building careers that pay, companies that last, and a creative ecosystem robust enough to withstand cycles of industry contraction. "Being in the room is one thing," she said. "Changing what happens in the room, that's the work we have to do."

 

 

The morning's most emotional sequence was the presentation of a BSO industry tribute to producer Jennifer Holness (Stateless, 40 Acres), co-founder of the organization itself. Introduced by her longtime colleague, Damon D'Oliveira, who called her simply "the spark that lit the fire," Holness accepted the honour five weeks after being struck by a car while crossing the street, with ligament damage, a concussion, and still, unmistakably, herself. She spoke about why she makes work: "To re-envision a cinematic world where we are an essential ingredient. Not marginalized and defined solely by our ability to endure, but instead sharing fully in the opportunities of this industry." The room responded as though the words had been waiting a long time to be said out loud.

 

The day's keynote, delivered by Adjoa Andoh (Bridgerton, Doctor Who), ranged across history, craft, personal grief, and hard-won wisdom about what it means to tell Black stories for a global audience. Andoh opened with a meditation on Albert Johanneson, the first Black player to appear in an FA Cup final in 1965, and a man whose career was dismantled by racism until he died alone in a council flat three decades later, unrecognized for weeks. From that history, she built an argument for the urgency of representation. "There is no dearth of talent," she told the audience, "only a dearth of imagination amongst the hirers and the firers."

 

 

The mid-morning panel Filmmaker's Perspective: Celebrating Black Creativity, moderated by NFB's Magalie Boutin, brought together director Alison Duke (Bam, Bam: The Sister Nancy Story; A Mother Apart, OYA Media Group) and Oscar- and Emmy-nominated director Hubert Davis (Youngblood, Black Ice) for a conversation that kept circling back to a single structural problem: the industry's persistent tendency to treat Black projects as niche. "Is Sinners niche?" Duke asked, in a line, the room clearly wanted to hear. "Good story is good story. Good story reaches everyone." 

 

 

The afternoon's platform ownership panel, featuring podcast entrepreneur Juleyka Lantigua (Lantigua Williams & Co.), producer and creator Effie Brown, writer-creator Tope Babalola, and producer Ian David Nsenga, pushed the conversation toward infrastructure. Lantigua was direct: "Ownership is destiny. If you are thinking long term and thinking across platforms, you have to start with ownership." The panel also surfaced a pointed tension: between the creative instinct to prioritize story and the commercial reality of building and monetizing audiences in a fragmented media landscape. The room left with no easy resolution, only a sharper sense of the stakes.

 

 

The Global Commissioners Super-Session drew some of the most direct testimony of the day. Nikki Love, SVP at ALLBLK and WEtv, was unambiguous about why her platform exists and where the broader industry now stands: "The industry has absolutely slowed down, and support for Black stories is out the window now. They're not doing that anymore. All we can do is keep supporting y'all." Kai Bowe of OWN spoke to the practical consequences of industry contraction on the producer pool, while Cédric-Pierre Louis, Director of Programming for African Fiction Channels at Canal+, offered perhaps the day's most forward-looking provocation: "There will come a point where you won't need to go to the West for financing, because you'll have an African market of investors who have built empires in this industry and will greenlight content from the diaspora."

 

 

Financing, and how to navigate it intelligently, was, of course, also on the agenda. A panel titled The Tipping Point: Financing Strategies That Get Projects Made featured Alfons Adetuyi (Inner City Films) and Carolyn Allain of the National Bank of Canada alongside Damon D'Oliveira (Conquering Lion Pictures), with Joan Jenkinson moderating. Adetuyi's advice to producers: bring your bank in early, and be transparent about every element of your financing stack. It is practical wisdom, hard-earned, that the room clearly needed, and it landed as one concrete tool among many in a day full of them.

 

 

The Symposium closed with a panel on New Metric Media's Hate the Player: The Ben Johnson Story, the Crave series that has become one of the most-discussed Canadian projects of the season. Creator and showrunner Anthony Q. Farrell, actor-producer Shamier Anderson, producer Mark Montefiore, actor Karen Robinson, and Ben Johnson himself took the stage for a conversation about what it actually takes, six years, in this case, to bring a culturally specific, Canadian-made story to the screen with its integrity intact. Anderson, who cold-called Montefiore mid-negotiation to demand a producer credit and eventually got one, summed up his operating philosophy in five words: "Closed mouths don't get fed."

 

By the time the day ended, what the third annual BSO Symposium had demonstrated, for the third time, was not a single theme but a posture: clear-eyed about the obstacles, rigorous about the craft, and entirely unwilling to wait for an industry to make space that Black creators are increasingly building for themselves. The room, once again, felt like proof of concept.