I’ll be honest. I wasn’t sure it would land. 

It was the summer of 2020. Our country was living through a reckoning. George Floyd was murdered and his death came in the wake of a wave of losses that had been building: Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Aubrey and so many others whose names we carry with us.

I had an idea that was equal parts hopeful and a little uncertain: a film festival. A companywide series that would use the power of film to deepen our understanding of the lived experiences of people of color. It was simple: we would select a film, folks would watch at home with family, perhaps with friends. And then we’d come together to talk – honestly, openly as colleagues about what we thought.    

I brought the idea to Andy, our founder and president. He said: I love it. Let’s do it. 

I lit the match. The Film Festival Committee built the fire. Every film selection carries their fingerprints. Every discussion reflects their care and the type of attention that turns one good idea into six years of extraordinary ones.

And then you mix in our colleagues. The Burnessers who show up — curious, engaged, open and present. That’s been the magic in the bottle for the past six years. 

Thirty films later – six years of dramas, documentaries, comedies and stories spanning the full breadth of human storytelling – the Burness Film Festival has become one of the most meaningful things we do together.

And on June 1, we marked Film 30 at Glen Echo Park with an evening I will not soon forget. 

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round tells the story of desegregation of that very park, where in the early 1960s a remarkable coalition of Howard University students and Jewish residents from the neighboring Bannockburn community stood shoulder to shoulder in nonviolent protest. They rode the carousel in defiance of segregation laws. They were turned away. They came back again and again until justice caught up with their courage. 

The film moved us, but seeing it in the place it actually happened moved us more. There’s no preparing for what happens when location and story collapse in the same moment. History stops being something you witness and becomes something you carry. 

Emmy-winning director Ilana Trachtman and Dion Diamond – Freedom rider, activist and one of the film’s central figures – joined me for a fireside chat that I will carry with me for a long time. We spoke about solidarity and courage but the thread that ran through everything was joy and the intentional, systematic effort to take it away. To tell people they couldn’t ride a park carousel or couldn’t spend a carefree summer afternoon like everyone else. That was the tragedy and the protestors at Glen Echo knew that fighting for joy itself was an act of resistance.  

The evening ended on the carousel. All of us. Together.

It’s a simple thing: a carousel ride on a warm June night. And because of legends like Dion Diamond, it’s also everything. His sacrifices, and those of so many others, are the reason that moment was possible. We honored it the best way we knew how by being fully, joyfully present. That’s also what the Film Festival for the past six years has taught us: the importance of understanding and fighting for everyone’s right to joy regardless of who they are or what they look like.

That’s the thing about joy when it’s finally free. It’s worth lingering in. It’s worth protecting. Dion Diamond knew that sixty years ago. On a warm June night in 2026, so did we.