A lot about the movie world has changed in the last 10 years, but Michelle Materre is the first to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

As the founder and curator of this weekend’s “Creatively Speaking” film series, an event organized with the goal of bringing to the screen stories told by and about communities of color, Ms. Materre has long been an advocate of works made with little chance of breaking through the Hollywood façade. When she launched the series in 1996 with the sense that there was a population of both audiences and filmmakers being chronically underserved by an industry committed to fluff, Ms. Materre sought to match an array of topical shorts and features with live, in-person presentations by the filmmakers.

On Saturday, “Creatively Speaking” will kick off its second decade at an all-new venue — the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Although BAM may be 28 subway stops from the series’ original home in Harlem’s Aaron Davis Hall, the event’s message has made the journey across the East River intact.

“There’s a perspective out there that mainstream audiences aren’t seeing,” Ms. Materre said this week. “And there’s this great wealth of short films that aren’t getting the exposure they deserve.”

Ms. Materre, herself a filmmaker, media consultant, and professor of media studies at the New School, said the series’s growing legion of fans has kept her interested in organizing “Creatively Speaking,” as hundreds have returned each year to witness the stories and interact with the storytellers. This year, she said, she’s interested in expanding that fan base by reaching a whole new circle of Brooklyn film lovers while continuing to organize a second event in Harlem — the newly titled “Harlem Stage on Screen,” which kicked off three weeks ago.

“It’s a challenge,” she said about organizing two events that fall in the same month. But it’s a challenge she knows will help these stories reach a far wider audience. “Some people just could not make it up to Harlem. Even some of my friends used to say, ‘Michelle, I’d love to come but I just couldn’t find the time to go all the way up there.’ So I feel like this is an important year for the event because it can finally connect with these people.”

The location is not the only thing that’s changed. When Ms. Materre first set to developing “Creatively Speaking,” the cinematic landscape was a far different terrain, dominated by major studios, few film festivals, expensive productions, and costly home video rollouts on VHS. Today, those rules have changed. It is now a world of numerous independent movie studios, as well as dozens of art-house theaters in major cities. Indeed, the industry is overwrought with digital cameras, affordable home-editing software, and instant mass distribution through such Web sites as Atomic Films and YouTube, not to mention DVDs.

“It’s easier today, yes,” Ms. Materre said, noting that anyone can pick up a camera, upload a video, and call himself a filmmaker. “But then you look around, and even though it’s easier, there really aren’t that many more stories being told. You look at what Hollywood puts out there and it’s predictable — what you’re going to see, and how you’re going to see it told. Where are the other voices?”

That’s why, Ms. Materre said, she sees “Creatively Speaking” as an invaluable filter to today’s chaotic film environment. “Because of all this, they’ve made me far more selective in terms of where I find my work. I’m not interested in someone who just picked up a camera and started filming; I’m interested in looking at this film as a craft, as a tool, as a way to exercise creativity on an important social issue,” she said.

And unlike YouTube, she said, “Creatively Speaking” is not an anonymous experience done at a desk or in a bedroom, but one that galvanizes a packed audience, demanding some degree of reaction, discussion, and debate.

This year, as she considers the nearly 20 films that will be presented Saturday and Sunday during eight separate programs, Ms. Materre points to several highlights that are sure to have people talking.

In “Bling: A Planet Rock,” showing Saturday evening, the director Raquel Cepeda builds a bridge between American hip-hip and the long civil war in Sierra Leone, which was caused in part by America’s obsession with diamonds — an obsession perpetuated in part by hip-hop icons.

If “Bling” epitomizes the series’s political awareness, then “One People,” showing Sunday afternoon as part of a three-film collection of shorts titled “Women on the Verge,” represents its affection for personal visions. In this 35-minute film directed by Al Santana and Laura Fowler, two sisters — one a filmmaker and the other a performance poet — come to discover the lives and beliefs of the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who used her art to raise awareness of the social injustices she saw in American society.

The series begins early Saturday afternoon with a 20th-anniversary celebration of “P.O.V.,” one of television’s most acclaimed venues for independent nonfiction films. The two chosen titles, “The Sixth Section” and “Al Otro Lado,” represent two of the more relevant recent episodes of the PBS series, both detailing the drama surrounding the border separating Mexico and America, and the lives being risked there on a daily basis.

Ultimately, Ms. Materre said, she hopes to take the series — which is more inclusive than other independent film series organized with a single ethnicity or race in mind — on the road, ideally to secondary markets that rarely see such films on the big screen, much less introduced by the people who made them.

“We take it for granted in New York, but there are places where these films would never have a chance to show in a theater,” she said. “People are hungry for this, and people embrace the conversation when they find it — we just need to get to them.”

Through Sunday (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).