Bilal Motley
Bilal Motley is a filmmaker from Chester, Pennsylvania.
As a filmmaker, Bilal focuses on projects that delve into environmental issues, and the intersections of class and race.
Films
QUARANTINE KIDS
Quarantine Kids is a short film that tells the courageous pandemic story of 9 year old, Bria, in her own words. Using previously recorded audio notes, the film is an honest, poignant, funny, and at times, heartbreaking testimony from a child’s point of view. Quarantine Kids is an Official Selection at the 2022 BlackStar Film Festival. The film won the first-ever Love+Grit Philadelphia Filmmaker Award presented by Visit Philadelphia.
BlackStar Film Fest - Award Winner
Variety Magazine - Press Release
Visit Philadelphia - Podcast Interview
MIDNIGHT OIL
For nearly fifteen years, Bilal worked as a steelworker at the area’s largest oil refinery. His documentary film, Midnight Oil, draws on this experience. The film chronicles his struggle to reconcile his love and kinship for his distressed refinery brothers and sisters and his growing awareness of the surrounding communities of color, fighting for environmental justice. Midnight Oil was a 2020 Official Selection at the BlackStar Film Festival and a Doc Society NYC grantee. The film was recently acquired by Black Public Media.
Philadelphia Inquirer Film Review
Delaware News Journal - Feature
TRASH & BURN
Located in an affluent, majority white county, the city of Chester, Pennsylvania is mostly black and home to an unprecedented cluster of industrial polluting facilities. Trash & Burn follows one woman's decades long fight to stop the nation's largest trash incinerator from polluting her small town.
Philadelphia Inquirer - Feature
Hurdle (Post-Production)
Underprivileged high school athletes are desperate to escape the intense pressure of their homes, schools, and neighborhoods. In Chester, PA, sports like Track & Field are a vehicle to transcend an uncertain future.
INWARDS IN PARIS (Pre-Production)
INWARDS IN PARIS is a feature drama that charms like Amélie with the intensity of Do the Right Thing. Obsessed with the idea of a race-free Paris, a black American wannabe expat is forced to confront his willful blindness as COVID-19 locks down the world and a racial reckoning emerges in France.
