Santa Cruz Black is honored, sad but proud and spiritually fortified as we come to an end of our 2025 BLACK on Screen Film Series. In October, we will screen a documentary that reveals the intimate registers of sustained abolitionist organizing and the toll it takes on those who work for structural change. Directed by Ashley O’Shay, Unapologetic follows two Black queer feminists and abolitionists navigating their lives and activism in the Windy City or the Chi circa 2015, after the extrajudicial murders of Rekia Boyd. Hailing from South Carolina, Janaé Bonsu, while completing her doctoral dissertation, organizes for BYP100 (Black Youth Project100). Ambrell Gambrell, a raptivist who goes by the moniker of Bella Bahhs, charts their own path while following in the footsteps of Black revolutionaries before them (Fred Hampton, Jesse Jackson, James Farmer).
Through a deeply personal lens, O’Shay has us following Bonsu’s academic organizing and Gambrell’s street-level, artistic resistance. By interweaving their private lives—family struggles, grief, and moments of vulnerability—with footage of protests, organizing meetings, and confrontations with institutional power, we are drawn into an intimate portrait of activism as both life-affirming and costly. Juxtaposing the raw energy of protest with the slow, bureaucratic machinery of official hearings and mayoral politics, Unapologetic situates its protagonists within a larger historical continuum, insisting that their fight is not just political, but existential.
The film asks how activists like Bonsu and Gambrell sustain their work amid emotional and systemic exhaustion, and whether change is possible from within the very institutions that harm their communities. It questions whose voices are centered in movements for Black liberation and how gender, queerness, and class complicate solidarity. Most crucially, it challenges viewers to consider what being “unapologetic” demands of those who resist—refusing respectability politics and embracing the discomfort of speaking truth to power.
This film clocks in at 82 minutes.
Join us at the Capitola Library or at the Resource Center for Nonviolence (or both!) to watch the film in community, followed by a discussion. Light refreshments will be provided at each event. Doors open at 6 pm, film starts at 6:30.
Register for the Capitola screening on October 21st here.
Register for the Resource Center for Nonviolence screening on October 22nd here.
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