September 20-22
YES (Young Emerging-Filmmakers Showcase)
Friday, September 20, 2024
3:00pm
Free Event
The Screening Room
NBPT DOCU FEST launched the YES Award (Young Emerging-Filmmakers Showcase) in 2021, with the sponsorship support of Dietz & Lynch Capital, creating a platform celebrating new and emerging filmmakers. The program features films showcasing the work of current and recent graduates from over 45 leading colleges and universities with film and media studies majors nationwide. It is, perhaps, their first opportunity to present their work to the general public. The YES Award is a juried competition—with a $1,000 first prize presented within the festival’s in-person forum.
Year: 2024
Runtime: TBD
Language: English
Country: United States
Sponsor: Dietz & Lynch Capital
Filmmaker Q&A: Yes
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IN THE WHALE
Friday, September 20, 2024
7:30pm (Reception begins at 6:30pm)
Firehouse Center for the Arts
In the shark-filled waters off Cape Cod, Michael Packard has long tempted fate. For several months a year, Packard buckles on his scuba tank and plunges into the cold waters off Provincetown to hunt on the seafloor. As the region’s last-remaining commercial lobster diver, the aging father has had his share of harrowing experiences, including near-drownings and close encounters with great whites. But what happened to him on a routine dive one June morning was something he never imagined possible, and many around the world refused to believe. In an experience of biblical proportions, Packard was engulfed by a humpback whale.
Year: 2023
Runtime: 81 minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Sponsor:
Director: David Abel
Filmmaker Q&A: Yes
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A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY
Saturday, September 21, 2024 10:00am
The Screening Room
An intimate, genre-bending portrait of a daughter’s attempt to piece together a portrait of her mother, an avant-garde journalist and a woman she never knew. Uncovering the vast archive Sheila Turner-Seed produced, including lost interviews with iconic photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Cecil Beaton, Lisette Model, and others, the film explores memory, legacy, and stories left untold.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 87 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Sponsor:
Director: Rachel Elizabeth Seed
First Time Filmmaker
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DRIVER
Saturday, September 21, 2024 10:00am
Firehouse Center for the Arts
A compelling examination of an unseen world, DRIVER follows long-haul truck driver Desiree Wood and a dynamic community of women truckers. Taking on routine sexual violence and an industry in which multibillion-dollar megacarriers conspire to make individual drivers anonymous and disposable, Desiree brings together an unlikely group of truckers to find strength, solidarity, and self-determination on the road.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 91 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Premiere: Massachusetts
Sponsor:
Director: Nesa Azimi
Filmmaker Q&A
The Outside World Shorts Block
Saturday, September 21, 2024 11:45am
The Screening Room
WEREE
Having fled the Liberian civil war, renowned self-taught artist Johnson Weree is seeking asylum in the Netherlands, where he lives undocumented and without a fixed address. Haunted by the horrors of his past, he draws otherworldly portraits while longing for a brighter future.
Year: 2023
Runtime: 15 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United Kingdom
Premiere: New England
Sponsor:
Director: Tal Amiran
Filmmaker Q&A
GATH & K’IYH: LISTEN TO HEAL
In Alaska, a community comes together to create music (with help from Yo-Yo Ma) as a critical part of collective healing and radical hope for the future. A poetic visual exploration of a community-led creative arts project aimed at better understanding and restoring our relationship with gath (king salmon) and k’iyh (birch) relatives. This film invites viewers to pause, to listen, to sing and dream together.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 8 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Premiere:
Sponsor: Dyno Records
Director: Princess Daazhraii Johnson
Filmmaker Q&A
FROM GOD TO MAN (Ma ŋaye ka Masaala a se ka Wɔmɛti )
On the day that Lansana Mansaray was born, a tree was planted in his name in his father’s Limba village in West Africa. Now an Emmy- and Peabody-nominated filmmaker, Mansaray returns to the same village to better understand the essential relationship that Limbas share with the trees that define every aspect of their community life. For a “city Limba man” like Mansaray, returning to his deceased father’s homeland becomes a journey of Indigenous reclamation.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 15 Minutes
Language: English, Other
Country: Sierra Leone
Premiere: New England
Sponsor:
Director: Lansana Mansaray
Filmmaker Q&A
PIBLOKTO
On the Arctic Ocean coast of Chukotka live a people cut off from the world. Their life revolves around hunting whales and walruses and protecting villages from bears coming from the tundra. All the inhabitants of this region are involved in the cycle of food and death. The film departs from the typical rhythmic structure of cinema, instead adopting the structure of a shamanic ritual, which is a meaning-forming event for the northern peoples.
Year: 2023
Runtime: 38 Minutes
Language: English, Russian
Country: United States
Premiere: New England
Sponsor:
Director: Anastasia Shubina & Timofey Glinin
Filmmaker Q&A
IGUALUDA
Saturday, September 21, 2024 11:45am
Firehouse Center for the Arts
Black Colombian activist Francia Márquez transforms a derogatory term, “igualada,” into a symbol of rights defiance. Her presidential campaign inspires a nation to dream of a more equitable future, challenging societal norms.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 78 Minutes
Language: Spanish
Country: United States, Colombia, Mexico
Premiere: New England
Sponsor:
Director: Juan Meija Botero
Filmmaker Q&A
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FAR OUT: LIFE ON & AFTER THE COMMUNE
Saturday, September 21, 2024 1:30pm
The Screening Room
This film traces 50 years in the lives of a group of New England writers, activists and artists. It conveys how the 1960s counterculture, embodied in two rural communes, transformed America. The story begins when a group of radical journalists (including Ray Mungo, brother of the longtime Screening Room operator Andrew Mungo ) leaves New York for a new life in the country. Follow along as they evolve from the back-to-the-land movement to a new discovery of political commitment.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 85 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Premiere: Massachusetts
Sponsor:
Director: Charles John Light
Filmmaker Q&A
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FILM IS DEAD: LONG LIVE FILM!
Saturday, September 21, 2024 1:30pm
Firehouse Center for the Arts
Come explore the vanishing world of private film collecting — an obsessive, secretive, often illicit world of basement film vaults, inhabited by passionate cinephiles devoted to the rescue and preservation of photochemical film. Condemned as pirates and hounded by the FBI, many film collectors have long lurked in the shadows. Yet their efforts have resulted in the survival of countless films that would otherwise have been lost to history. As analog film fades from memory, the basement-dwellers and bootleggers of old are finally being given their due.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 103 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Sponsor:
Director: Peter Flynn
Filmmaker Q&A
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OUR TURN TO TALK
Saturday, September 21, 2024 3:30pm
The Screening Room
This important film focuses on the teenagers who say they’re the generation to put an end to mental health stigma. To do it, they’re telling their own stories – raw and unfiltered. From skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression to the impacts of racial and intergenerational trauma, these teens share their struggles and triumphs and carry a powerful message: Storytelling saves lives.
Year: 2023
Runtime: 70 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Sponsor:
Director: Beth Murphy & Patrice Howard
Filmmaker Q&A
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LEGACIES SHORTS BLOCK
Saturday, September 21, 2024 3:30pm
Firehouse Center for the Arts
THE ELEPHANT IN THE DRIVEWAY
A middle-school English teacher by day, Megan Hart decides one morning to begin making a giant puppet of a one-eyed elephant. Expenses soon begin to spiral and her whimsy grows into an obsession. Meanwhile, her friends and family can’t help but wonder: What is this all for?
Year: 2024
Runtime: 15 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Premiere: East Coast
Sponsor:
Director: Hoag Kepner
Filmmaker Q&A
KISMET
Eight teenagers spend a week in New Hampshire at a technical rock climbing program, where they begin to consider the potential of shaping their own destinies.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 35 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Premiere:
Sponsor:
Director: Everett Ravens
Filmmaker Q&A
FORE & AFT
For over 230 years, Lowell’s Boat Shop has perched over the Merrimack River in Massachusetts. It holds the distinction of being America’s oldest continually operated wooden boat shop. Once an economic powerhouse, Lowell’s is now primarily a museum, a National Historic Landmark, and a vital hub for youth mentorship. Master boat builder Graham McKay imparts the nuances of boat building to apprentices, reanimating a dying craft. While Graham has mentored for years, he finds an uncommonly precocious pupil in William, a 16-year-old drawn to the water and the workshop.
Year: 2023
Runtime: 26 Minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Premiere:
Sponsor:
Director: Gabe Gerzon
Filmmaker Q&A
FILMMAKERS’ ROUNDTABLE
Free Event
Saturday, September 21, 2024
5:30-6:30pm
Port Vida, a Mexican Cantina
10 Center Street
Sponsored by Ford Hall Forum
THE ROAD TO RUANE
Saturday, September 21, 2024
7:30pm (Reception begins at 6:30pm)
Firehouse Center for the Arts
A filmmaker’s journey to capture the storied life of Billy Ruane, a troubled, legendary figure on Boston’s celebrated live music scene, becomes an examination of the human condition.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 102 minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Sponsor: DYNO Records
Director: Scott Evans & Michael Gill
Filmmaker Q&A
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OUT THERE: A NATIONAL PARKS STORY
Sunday, September 22, 2024 10:00am
Firehouse Center for the Arts
A young filmmaker and his childhood best friend set out on a 10,000-mile exploration of our magnificent national parks during the centennial year of the formation of the National Park Service. Along the road, they record the stories of the vast diversity of visitors for whom the parks system was created.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 73 minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Sponsor:
Director: Brendan Hall
Filmmaker Q&A
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Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano
Sunday, September 22, 2024 11:30am
The Screening Room
On August 4th, 2020, the catastrophic explosion at the port of Beirut leaves a large part of the Lebanese capital in ruins. In the midst of the chaos, a troubled film crew faces an overwhelming decision: to continue the
production of their movie or abandon it? As they face the aftermath of the calamity, they are torn between their firm belief in the transformative power of cinema and a deep sense of cynicism about its ability to enable change in a nation plagued by economic turmoil and societal collapse.
Year: 2023
Runtime: 87 minutes
Language: English, Arabic, French
Country: Germany
Director: Cyril Aris
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HOLLYWOODGATE
Sunday, September 22, 2024 11:30am
Firehouse Center for the Arts
When the United States withdrew from its 20-year “Forever War” in Afghanistan, the Taliban regained control of the ravaged country and immediately found an American base loaded with weaponry. Unprecedented and audacious, director Ibrahim Nash’at’s immersive documentary spends a year inside Afghanistan following the Taliban as they take possession of the cache America left behind — and transform from a fundamentalist militia into a heavily-armed military regime.
Year: 2023
Runtime: 89 minutes
Language: Pashto (Pushto)
Country: Egypt
Premiere: Massachusetts
Sponsor:
Director: Ibrahim Nash’at
Filmmaker Q&A
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CREATIVE ACT SHORTS BLOCK
Sunday, September 22, 2024 1:30pm
The Screening Room
THE KATZ TAPES
From 1980-2005, Larry Katz, a reporter for the Boston Herald, interviewed music’s biggest stars and recorded their conversations onto cassette tapes. His collection has been sitting untouched and unheard for decades… until now.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 25 minutes
Language: English
Country: United
Premiere:
Sponsor: DYNO Records
Director: Adam Fischer
Filmmaker Q&A
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HOW IT BREATHES
Elijah Jamal Balbed grew up in Washington D.C. in the midst of one of its most difficult eras, as the city’s identity was being tested. As his hometown changed around him, Elijah’s budding career as a musician exposed him to the music providing a voice for the people of D.C. Now tasked with preserving and sharing that tradition, Balbed reflects on balancing that responsibility with creating a musical identity of his own.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 10 minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Premiere:
Sponsor: DYNO Records
Director: Jack Gordon
Filmmaker Q&A
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THE AIR MADE VISIBLE
Now in his nineties, the kinetic sculptor Tim Prentice looks back on his career and the influences that shaped him, including his fascination with the wind, the artists
Alexander Calder and George Rickey, and his time at Yale studying with Joseph Albers, as well as his loss of
vision to macular degeneration. The artist strives to
create an “ideal” work that, like nature, expresses at once both chaos and order. The film was shot at his home and studio in Litchfield County, Connecticut and contains footage from many of the large, commissioned public works he has done over the decades.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 42 minutes
Language: English
Country: United States
Premiere: World
Sponsor:
Director: A’Dora Phillips
Filmmaker Q&A
SILVER’S UPRISING
Sunday, September 22, 2024 1:30pm
Firehouse Center for the Arts
In a country ravaged by PTSD, Amos Dov Silver swore he would never let anyone suffer the way he did. But when the mobile app he creates becomes the largest marketplace for marijuana in Israel, he becomes a guru to thousands, and a persecuted enemy of the state.
Year: 2022
Runtime: 97 minutes
Language: Hebrew
Country: Israel
Premiere: Massachusetts
Sponsor:
Director: Don Shadur
Filmmaker Q&A
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APRIL IN FRANCE
Sunday, September 22, 2024 3:30pm
The Screening Room
A rare portrait of the magic of early childhood. April, a 5-year-old English girl, moves to Paris just before the lockdown. She feels miserable, isolated in her Parisian flat and desperately wanting to return to London. When the restrictions ease, her father drives her to a small medieval village in the southwest of France, where her great-grandfather bequeathed them his house. At first April is not much happier in the deserted village, but she slowly discovers it. Eventually she meets some of her great-grandfather’s surviving friends, with whom she will open to the world.
Year: 2023
Runtime: 76 minutes
Language: French, English
Country: France
Premiere: East Coast
Sponsor:
Director: David Boaretto
First Time Filmmaker
Filmmaker Q&A
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PINK BELT
Sunday, September 22, 2024 3:30pm
Firehouse Center for the Arts
Aparna Rajawat, India’s 16-time champion in martial arts, attempts to break the Guinness World Record for most women trained in a self-defense lesson. As a girl, Aparna’s father prevented her from taking karate lessons because he thought it was a boys’ sport and believed her participation would shame the family. Her cousin, a men’s national champion, convinced her father to let him train her. Aparna passed as a boy at the karate school, and she won several competitions. Years later she started Pink Belt to teach girls their legal rights, self-defense, and self-determination.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 79 minutes
Language: English, Hindi
Country: United States
Premiere: North America
Sponsor:
Director: John McCrite
Filmmaker Q&A
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PORCELAIN WAR
Sunday, September 22, 2024 5:30pm
Firehouse Center for the Arts
Under missile strikes and roaring fighter jets, Ukrainian artists Slava, Anya, and Andrey choose to stay behind and fight, contending with the soldiers they have become. Defiantly finding beauty amid destruction, they show that although it’s easy to make people afraid, it’s hard to destroy their passion for living.
Year: 2024
Runtime: 87 minutes
Language: Russian, Ukranian
Country: United States
Sponsor:
Director: Brendan Bellamo & Slava Leontyev
First Time Filmmaker
Filmmaker Q&A
View Trailer