John Mills Featured Alongside Dr. My Haley in BIFA Houston Film Festival Campaign

Memorial
Written By John Mills

The Black Independent Filmmakers Association Houston Film Festival recently unveiled promotional artwork for its 2026 festival, and I was honored to see myself included among the 9 people selected to be featured in the artwork!

What makes the moment particularly meaningful to me is this year's theme, “ROOTS: THE REVIVAL,” and the opportunity to be featured alongside Dr. My Haley, widow of Roots author Alex Haley. Dr. Haley is pictured in the upper right of the artwork, and will be speaking at the event!

My own journey into public history began with genealogy—searching for my ancestors, uncovering their experiences with slavery and freedom, and eventually expanding that work to recover the stories of others whose lives have been overlooked. That journey is at the heart of Reverence: Reclaiming the Forgotten, which has been selected to screen at BIFA Houston.

The festival artwork carries a message that could not be more fitting:

“Our Stories Matter. Our Culture! Our History! Our Legacy!”

I'm incredibly grateful that Reverence will be part of this celebration of Black storytelling, history, and legacy.

The festival film schedule has not yet been published, but I will update my film webpage with registration information when available. You can get to the film webpage at https://alexbreanne.org/reverence.

Thank you all for your continued support!

John

John Mills

Originally from San Diego, John Mills is a technologist by trade, but an equity advocate and independent scholar by passion. The descendant of both southern and northern enslaved, John focuses on unearthing little known people and stories of this country’s history in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. John presents research through the lens and perspective of a descendant, with intent to inspire understanding and empathy, a means to inspire good, God fearing people, now armed with information, to look into whether they may be unwittingly aligning to biases resulting from the reverberating effects of a past time. John is a member of the Connecticut Freedom Trail and a member of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum Council. John is also working with an international team funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in an effort to deliver transformational impact on digital methods in cultural institutions...a means to decolonize museums. Finally, John is working with the state of Connecticut, business leaders and scholars in Middletown, CT to honor and memorialize a former enslaved individual by the name of Prince Mortimer.

https://alexbreanne.org
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