Bilal Motley
Bilal Motley, featured in CNN, Variety, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, is an award-winning filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter from Chester, PA.
Bilal Motley is an artist and filmmaker from Chester, Pennsylvania, who has been spotlighted in major outlets including Variety, CNN, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He was the 2025 Ted Turner Keynote Speaker at George Washington University’s Planet Forward Environmental Summit. As a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), he leads film workshops that empower journalists and young people to craft powerful documentaries about climate change.
Films
QUARANTINEÂ 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 &Â 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
​
​
NPR/WHYY Studio 2 - Podcast w/Cherri Gregg
​
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.
​
FAREWELL, AMERICA (Post-Production)
A Black American family considers fleeing to Canada—but chooses to stay and fight in the most critical election of their lives.
