Films

When a mining project threatens her ancestral lands, Sámi reindeer herder Maia calls upon her estranged uncle for legal advice, but his return opens deep familial wounds in indigenous Sámi filmmaker Elle Sofe Sara’s inventive, visually arresting musical drama.

Fed-up communities in Louisiana and Appalachia's Rust Belt find themselves thrust into an unlikely role—that of accidental activists—as they take on factory polluters and fracking practices that have had devastating effects on the health of their friends and families.

Deep in the breathtaking rainforests of Indonesia, an existential battle rages: vegetable oil production versus the planet’s future. This visually stunning, emotionally unsettling documentary captures the passion and purpose of native people battling multinational corporations to save their home.

"If music could talk, which means whatever your mind can bring.” This collection of documentary short films invite a sense of curiosity and quest, seeking to grasp human thought, motive, and expression. In Nita Blum and Jonathan Pickett’s A NEW INFERNO (US 2026, 16 min), paramedics race to save the lives of heatstroke victims using a radical new treatment. With an experimental sensibility, Karla Condado’s MIRIAM (Mexico 2025, 19 min) copes with grief as the filmmaker reads personal letters to her aunt who was a victim of femicide. Along the picturesque coastline of Brittany, France, bright orange novelty Garfield phones wash ashore in Zack Grant’s eccentric SILLY LITTLE PLASTIC CAT (France/US 2026 12 min). In SWING SWISH SWAY (US 2026, 7 min), TT Takemoto's colorful and tangible reconstruction of history is inspired by Filipina-American Rose Bamberger, founder of Daughters of Bilitis, San Francisco’s own first lesbian activist group. Free-spirited and expressive, Charlie Eguia’s HAPPINESS FOR A HERDER (US/Mongolia 2026, 16 min) follows a group of nomadic herder families in Mongolia. —Diana Sánchez Maciel

“Big business, it don't like you, it don't like the things you do. You got no money, so you got no power.”   In this selection of short-form films, protagonists assert their power and try to rewrite the narrative against powerful forces they face.  In Maia Wikler’s documentary WILD EAST (Canada/US 2026, 36 min), environmental activist Gabi Paun risks his life to expose illegal logging in Romania’s ancient forests, taking on timber mafias and IKEA while revealing the hidden cost of the world’s appetite for cheap furniture. In the fictional FLESH IMPACT (US 2026, 17 min), director Maggie Gyllenhaal assembles a notable cast (Ellen Burstyn, Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard) to tell a revisionist history of Marilyn Monroe, who faces down studio pressure to assert her voice and influence, in a speculation on a career that might have been.  Then in FREE JOAN LITTLE (US 2025, 38 min), award-winning filmmaker Yoruba Richen excavates a groundbreaking true-life 1975 case that galvanized Black Power activists, feminists, and prison reformers around one young Black woman’s historic fight for justice and the right to defend herself against sexual violence.  Be sure not to miss this memorable, eclectic trio of legends and their stories. —Michelle Svenson

In Nita Blum and Jonathan Pickett’s A New Inferno, paramedics race to save the lives of heatstroke victims using a radical new treatment.

Along the picturesque coastline of Brittany, France, bright orange novelty Garfield phones wash ashore in Zack Grant’s eccentric short.

Environmental activist Gabi Paun risks his life to expose illegal logging in Romania’s ancient forests, taking on timber mafias and IKEA while revealing the hidden cost of the world’s appetite for cheap furniture.