Friday, June 6

Director: Paola Michaela

Narrative Short in English

Canada

4:23

While cooking Badhakopi’r Ghonto – a mixed vegetable stir fry—, Laila reflects on the act of cooking, loving, and what it means to find and keep a good man in a world of monsters.

Director: Paola Michaela

Narrative Short with Captions in English

United States

8:48

Lupe doesn’t care about her abuela’s cooking lessons, she just wants to rock with her badass punk band. But when Lupe finds herself battling an alien monster with her band, her abuela's lessons will remind her that punk rock is more than just loud music, and connecting with her Latin roots may just save their lives.

Director: Humaira Hannan Snigdha

Narrative Short with Captions in English

Bangladesh

10:00

Farhana's seemingly content marriage to her husband hides her longing for a deeper connection. A chance encounter with another woman, Nisha, ignites the spark within Farhana. She is forced to confront her true desires and navigate a world that is hostile of their identities. When Nisha's sudden departure coincides with a life-changing revelation from Farhana's husband, Farhana must deal with love, loss, and discouragement. She must face her authenticity in the face of societal pressure.

Featuring a post-screening filmmaker Q&A

Director: Annie Laurie Medonis

Documentary Feature with Captions in English

United States

01:18:00 

In the '70s and '80s, there were over 230 feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses throughout the United States and Canada. Bloodroot, located in Bridgeport, Connecticut, is now the oldest and longest lasting of those spaces, in continuous operation for over 46 years. A Culinary Uprising: The Story of Bloodroot is a short documentary that explores this feminist, queer, vegan restaurant and bookstore, and illuminates the legacy of its pioneering proprietors, Selma Miriam and Noel Furie.

Director: Mohammad Hasani

Experimental Short with no Dialogue

Iran

9:00

A poetic surrealistic journey of a woman facing the very nature of her being.

Director: Kaia Green

Experimental Short with No Dialogue

United States

3:33

"do you see light as i see it?" is an exploration of light through the lens of astigmatism, revealing a beautiful perspective of ordinary encounters. As light bends and shifts, the narrative encourages the audience to look inward—challenging them to reflect on their own perceptions of beauty and to reconstruct their identity and values in a more authentic way.

Director: Giovannie Espiritu

Spoken Word Performance Poetry in English

United States

2:01

A spoken word poem about sexual assault.

Featuring a post-screening filmmaker Q&A with Arletta Director and Arletta herself.

Director: Montana James Miller

Documentary, Experimental with Captions in English

United States

12:10

Travel with us to the Díne (Navajo Nation) to visit a member of the Deaf Indigenous community. This is the powerful story of Arletta. An elder woman who is Deaf and grew up and still lives on the rural Navajo Nation. Find out her Super Power through this incredible journey Arletta wants to share with you and the world. Please keep an open mind and learn from Arletta.

Director: ILIANA PAGÁN-TEITELBAUM

Experimental Short with Captions in English

United States

8:00

A poetic migration journey of a 100-year-old mulberry tree and a Caribbean woman across oceans to a metropolis where they are both harmed. The connection with the tree brings healing to the woman in her sick bed.

Director: Lark Orbe

Experimental with Captions in English

United States

5:00

“Embodied Consent" is an excerpt from the zine titled "Learning Good Consent" by Riot Grrrl Press. Through narration and experimental movement, the piece tells the story of how to practice "embodied consent" in physical and sexual intimacy. Included are quotations of real people's experiences with consent, trauma, and embodiment. This piece offers audiences an invitation to ask themselves "What is consent? Am I embodying a practice of consent in my relationships? What does 'yes' and 'no' feel like in my body?" These questions are essential for building a culture of sexual assault prevention and positive and healing experiences in physical intimacy.

Director: Petra Kuppers

Documentary, Experimental with Captions in English

United States

35:30

How do disabled and mad people survive, dance, insert their differences in a world full of stigma? How do we live through bodymindspirit experiences of alienation and pain? This experimental documentary charts disability culture archives and embodied gestures of survival and creative expression. It draws on community with human and non-human others: media clips as performance gifts, archival footage from dance archives, environmental embedment and grounding in trees, water, desert and lakes. Together, we dance, and spring our binds.

Director: Alison Johnson

Experimental Short with Captions in English

United States

3:12

January 22 is an intimate film about the filmmaker's personal experience having an abortion on the anniversary of Roe V. Wade. Through a candid and reflective lens, the diary style film delves into this topic with honesty and sensitivity.

Director: Anne Ciecko

Documentary, Experimental with Captions in English

United States

3:12

Solitary walking becomes an essential therapeutic means of forgetting-and-remembering painful loss, mortality, and corporealized grief—revealing unexpectedly affecting poetry in traversed landscapes, an acutely inflamed body, ritualized medical care, and the uncanny manifestations of lensed observations.

Directors: Seth Thompson and Hannah Sullivan

Documentary in English

United States

32:40 

Eight women tell their mastectomy stories, and challenge societal expectations for reconstruction. Along the way, they expose the breast implant industry, and the problematic policies and health issues that create harm.

Director: Maya X Dominguez

Narrative Short with Captions in English

United States

13:48

Jadyn a young undocumented Latina, is stuck in an abusive relationship with her partner, Spencer. When Jadyn discovers she's pregnant, she must find the courage to escape the dangers of her situation.

Director: Celina Galicia

Documentary with Captions in English

United States

15:00

Ternura Radical (Radical Tenderness) is a documentary that amplifies the voices in the fight for justice for Isabel Cabanillas, an artist and social activist murdered in an act of femicide, and the relentless search for Esmeralda Castillo Rincón, who disappeared in Ciudad Juárez. Through the lens of women who transform their pain into art, the documentary portrays a powerful form of protest and resistance against gender violence and impunity. These stories reflect the harsh reality faced by many families across the region and Mexico, highlighting the courage of those who continue to seek justice.

Director: Giuliana Racco

Documentary, Experimental with Captions in English

Canada and State of Palestine

19:00

High Roads is a journey through overlapping narrations concerning the paradoxical conditions of the search for well-being in Occupied Palestine. Filmed between Palestine and Barcelona, High Roads dialogues with physicist Dr. Wafaa Khater, Olympian swimmer Sabine Hazboun, marathon-runner Diala Isid and yoga instructor Eilda Zaghmout: four women who generate well-being and wonder in defiance of a relentless oppression. Their diverse yet interconnected practices of SUMUD (steadfastness) across this fragmented non-state, provide a glimpse into the multiple ways in which Palestinians try to ‘live well’, using their bodies, breath, and minds as tools for everyday resistance to military occupation

Director: Laura Basombrío

Documentary, Experimental with Captions in English

Argentina

01:18:18

Inhabiting the border that separates the mystical and the earthly, Souls proposes a dream. Over the half-Martian, half-Lunar landscapes of the Argentine Northwest, Estela tells her story. Since her mother died, the wounds press upon her ailing spirit. Her mother returns in dreams with messages, the violence of her father exerts pressure from the past, the distance of her husband feeds on secrets.

Director: Jill Daniels

Documentary, Video Essay with Captions in English

United Kingdom

Duration: 15:00

An autobiographical documentary filmed on a smartphone in London at the start of the Israeli state's murderous attack on Gaza, three Jewish women of European heritage - Ruth, Gail and me, all born in 1948, the same year as the Israeli state - discuss the (fairy) stories of empty deserts and false dreams of Jewish salvation we heard about Israel growing up. 1948 What We Knew paints a compelling portrait of contested Jewish identity.

Director: Zainab Muse

Documentary Feature in English

Canada

Duration: 1:30:00

Know Her Name is a mystery documentary that delves into the legacy of filmmakers and uncovers the mystery of why women, especially women from underrepresented communities like Zora Neale Hurston and Esther Eng, have been forgotten in discussions of film, erased through HISTORICAL AMNESIA – and, how to make sure this doesn’t continue to happen to contemporary filmmakers from diverse backgrounds, now and in the future.

A true NM Borderlands original, Tony is a visionary Latino director, sculptor, puppet designer, magician, and educator based in Los Angeles. He has worked across film, television, theater, and animation—bringing imaginative worlds to life through hands-on craft and design. Tony created the iconic costumes for David Lynch’s Rabbits, and worked as a puppet fabricator on the Oscar-winning Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio with ShadowMachine. He worked as art director and puppet make for Eels video "Bone Dry." At Laika, he helped build the worlds of Coraline and Paranorman, and he served as Art Director and head of the puppet department for Shape Island on Apple TV+.

A graduate of the Magic University at Hollywood’s legendary Magic Castle, Tony blends enchantment with craft across media. Whether sculpting a creature, directing a film, or designing a world in miniature, his work invites us to see beyond the ordinary.

Stef Choi is an animation character designer, concept artist, ceramicist, and cartoonist living in Los Angeles, California. She’s worked at Sony Animation Studios and has designed characters for Coraline (2009) Boxtrolls (2014), Rugrats Reboot (2021), and Wish Dragon 2. Some of her other past clients include LAIKA Entertainment, Nickelodeon, Disney Television Animation, DreamWorks, Cartoon Network, and Marvel.

In 2022, Stef made her first venture into comic books with a graphic memoir series entitled JELLY CAKE.  The first issue was released in 2022 and the second issue will be released in  2025.  She also illustrated Ruby Lu, Star of the Show (Simon & Schuster), and was featured in Cartoon Modern (Chronicle Books) and The Art of Boxtrolls (Chronicle Books). Her work has been featured at MOMA, Cartoon Brew, Gallery Nucleus, Portland Museum of Art, and OOO Shop in Kyoto, Japan.

Virtual Presentation: Dr. David Tenorio’s research examines the representation of queer futurity as portrayed by contemporary artists, performers, writers, and filmmakers from Mexico, Cuba, and their diasporas in the United States. Using participatory video, digital ethnography, performance studies, and literary analysis, he surveys the contradictory sites that allow queer artists to produce cultural texts within normative structures, creating networks of dissidence that challenge the social binary of homo/heterosexuality. He argues that queer renditions of utopia propose alternative forms of intimacy, belonging, and citizenship outside normative heterosexual teleologies of progress.

Dr. Tenorio has been involved in multiple digital humanities projects and has received numerous grants and fellowships. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the LASA Sexualities Section and as an Editorial Team Member for the Newsletter of the Caribbean Studies Association.

Director: Jone Arriola Lobete

Narrative Short in Spanish

Spain

14:00

A bathroom with an old aesthetic and pink. In the middle of the bathroom is a bathtub where two young men relax while smoking a joint. As the joint takes effect, they begin to philosophize about the origin and creation of the elements, until the conversation turns to more personal topics.

Director: Saray Argumedo

Documentary Short with Captions in English

USA

14:21

F*CK FAME sheds light on the underground feminist HipHop movement in Mexico through the lens of an all femme hiphop collective crew called Batallones Femeninos. This documentary also includes their latest single “Éxodus,” a song in solidarity with all those that have continuously risked their lives migrating in hopes of a better future and that visibilices continuous forced migration, deportation and all those that lost their lives in the process.

Batallones Femeninos is an underground autonomous, activist, feminist Hip-Hop collective crew that started in 2009, in what is now known as the borderland of Mexico/United States in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico.

Director: Melodie Bianca Cissou

Narrative Short with Captions in English

France

12:12 

Memories of a summer. Loona 18 years old goes on a trip with her friends. There, she discovers her sexuality, shared between Hisham and Maude. Two intertwined, unfinished love stories.

Director: Carolina Erives

Documentary with Captions in English

Mexico

14:24 

Amanda Montejo is a trans woman, make up artist, Guadalupana and a witch. This documentary portrait explores different facets of her spirituality and fragments of her past, revealing the duality of her being.

Director: Nano Arenado

Narrative Short in English

USA

15:00

This is Tito's story of how he found himself again after his divorce from Sharon. Along the way he meets some odd ball characters, (played by local drag kings and queer artists) gets a glimpse into a colorful queer world.

Director: Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Narrative Short with Captions in English

USA

29:00

A Filipina American college student uses art to encourage new sexualities for herself and other Asian American women.

In class with a powerful professor, Morena revisits her childhood as she experiences the stirrings of desire in coming of age.

By making a "house her sexuality," she creates the art of sex, recognizing the traumas and joys of brown girlhood. And realizes sexuality as a site of passion, power, politics, and pleasure.

She refutes, refuses and rebuts how her sexuality intertwines with servility and possession by others so as to forge different sexual futures, freedoms and autonomies.

Click to Read Leah Abuan Milne on “So to Speak”

Director: Paige McKenna Grube

Documentary with Captions in English

USA

1 hour 20 minutes

GOLD is a documentary exploring the lives of four current dancers and the owner of the Gold Nugget strip club in Spread Eagle, Wisconsin. The film focuses heavily on Dusty's story, who was a dancer in the 90s. She has owned the club for 30 years, and runs the club in a way that empowers women, guiding them to further education, encourages them toward sobriety, and offers respect and support through unconditional (and sometimes tough) love.

Each of these women have unique and different pasts that landed them in the industry, but each of their stories are relatable to women everywhere. Both inspiring and at times, heartbreaking, GOLD offers a unique perspective into the world of women who work at this particular club in this rural part of the US.