The Festival is very different this year. It’s all virtual! Anyone will be able to access the films through this very website. We hope this will enable the films to reach a significantly wider audience than is usual at an in-person American Anthropological Association meeting.

Our programming this year centers around five core themes: (1) Territory, History, Identity; (2) Environment, Resources, Labor; (3) Movements, Borders, Identities; (4) Thinking and Creating; and (5) Health and Healing. Each cluster of films corresponding to each theme will be screened for ten days, and that ten-day period will be followed by virtual events like panel discussions and Q&A with film directors, conducted virtually (TBA).

We had 105 entries from 32 countries. Our wonderful dedicated jurors – Harjant Gill, John Bishop, and Fiona McDonald –selected 30 films from those submissions to showcase in this year’s Film and Media Festival. These 30 films include the winners in our four traditional prize categories (that all happen to come from different countries): Best Feature, Best Short, Best Student Film, and the Jean Rouch Award. Although tackling radically different topics, each of our award-winning films seems especially relevant to our current moment worldwide.

We invite you to watch and think about these films, and to engage with the filmmakers over the next two and a half months.

Veronica Davidov and Damien Stankiewicz, Festival Co-Directors