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Taylor Hosking’s debut feature documentary “West Side Familia” will screen at BlackStar Film Festival’s 15th edition
The Apex Times

THE APEX TIMES

Culture/The Apex Times/Jul 30, 1:09 PM EDT

Taylor Hosking’s debut feature documentary “West Side Familia” will screen at BlackStar Film Festival’s 15th edition

The 75-minute, written, directed, and produced film follows a Puerto Rican biker gang and uses their lives to trace New York City’s changing social and cultural terrain across the 20th and 21st centuries.

2 min readEditor-approved Apex article

The BlackStar Film Festival is scheduled to open next week with West Side Familia, a debut feature documentary from New York City-based filmmaker Taylor Hosking. The film, a 75-minute documentary feature, is written, directed, and produced by Hosking, who builds the work around the experiences of a Puerto Rican biker gang and the broader neighborhoods that shape and are shaped by them.

Deadline reports that West Side Familia takes a tightly connected approach, using the gang’s story as an anchor to examine the trajectory of New York City across two centuries. In the film’s framing, the characters and their community life are positioned as a lens onto shifting power, identity, and belonging as the city moves through the 20th and 21st centuries.

Hosking’s documentary debut is described as a focused, interwoven narrative, suggesting that the structure is designed to keep personal detail central while still addressing larger historical and cultural changes. Deadline characterizes the feature as tightly bound, emphasizing how the film interrogates the city’s evolution through the people inside it, rather than through detached narration.

The festival appearance places Hosking’s first feature documentary into a larger programming context. Deadline’s coverage notes that the screening occurs during the BlackStar Film Festival’s 15th edition, an event that typically brings together documentary work and filmmakers for an audience seeking culture and social histories told through film.

For audiences, the film’s subject matter is expected to center on community, family, and the systems that surround street life, including how neighborhoods develop and how social roles shift over time. The project’s focus on a Puerto Rican biker gang also indicates an emphasis on representation, not just in terms of who is on screen, but in how lived experience is organized into a documentary feature.

The production’s creative control, as described by Deadline, indicates that Hosking led the development from script to final direction and production. That all-in-one authorship can matter for how a documentary handles tone, pacing, and the balance between character-based storytelling and historical reflection, particularly for a debut feature.

As the festival week approaches, the next step is the public presentation itself, with BlackStar Film Festival opening next week with West Side Familia. The film’s reception at the festival will determine how quickly Hosking’s debut builds momentum for further screenings and distribution opportunities, given that early festival positioning often functions as the first major visibility point for new documentary work.

Why It Matters

  • A festival opening next week gives Hosking’s debut feature a major platform at a time when early visibility can shape later screening and distribution paths for new documentary films.
  • By centering a Puerto Rican biker gang, the film adds to cultural record and representation of specific community histories in a documentary format.
  • The film’s stated method of tying personal lives to longer citywide change across two centuries highlights how public understanding of local history can be built through character-based storytelling.
  • The all-creative-control approach (writing, directing, producing by Hosking, per Deadline) may affect how audiences experience narrative emphasis and documentary framing for a debut feature.

Sources

Key Facts

  • BlackStar Film Festival’s 15th edition will open next week with West Side Familia.
  • West Side Familia is a 75-minute documentary feature debut from NYC-based filmmaker Taylor Hosking.
  • Deadline reports Hosking wrote, directed, and produced West Side Familia.
  • The documentary follows the lives of a Puerto Rican biker gang and uses their trajectory to examine New York City across the 20th and 21st centuries.
  • Deadline describes the film as tightly bound and structured around interrogating the city’s changes through its characters.