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Maryland Film Festival 2025: Cinema Saturation in Baltimore
Rocky Shay in Junkie If last year’s Maryland Film Festival felt like a trial run for a new era of Baltimore’s cornerstone film event, the 26th Maryland Film Festival solidified its direction. Bouncing back from the low point of 2023, when the event was postponed for a year due to financial constraints, MdFF looks to continue growing its reach—a herculean effort in 2025 as arts institutions across the country are under attack by crackdowns in free speech and having their federal funding gutted. “We were awarded [an NEA] grant, then it was taken away,” Nancy Proctor, the new executive director of the Parkway tells me. “It was awarded again, then the government shut down.”
The government shutdown also affected the actual programming: festival director KJ Mohr was looking to show Lois Weber’s silent film Hypocrites on 35mm with live accompaniment, but given the state of the archival print they decided to switch to a copy of Where Are My Children?, Weber’s film from the following year. That print was housed by the Library of Congress and became completely inaccessible during the shutdown, forcing them to go back to Hypocrites, this time playing a DCP of Kino Lorber’s restoration. Symbolically, that film has a connection with the Parkway: it was released in 1915, the same year the theater opened as a silent picture house.
Hypocrites is one extreme of what the theater will be offering going forward (Mohr even mentioned a desire to get a piano or organ for more regular live accompaniments to silents); on the opposite end of the spectrum is the emerging technologies and expanded cinema showcase, CineTech, programmed by MdFF’s marketing director Q Ragsdale. This program was much more robust than the previous iteration—exhibiting video games, VR, AR and expanded cinema—and is going to have more of a year-round presence at the Parkway, especially given Proctor’s background in integrated technology. One of the Parkway’s big renovation plans is replacing its Theater 1 screen with a retractable one, opening up the stage for live performance opportunities on top of cinema and talks. “We’re looking for other sources, including earned revenue,” Proctor says. “I’d really like to see this building activated most of the year, not just during the film festival—I’m tempted to say 365 days a year, but we will take a few days off.”
While Proctor’s bread-and-butter is integrating and showcasing emerging technology, Mohr’s background is in programming experimental film, which was on full display at this year’s fest. 2026 marked the return of MdFF’s dedicated experimental block, “Diverging Forms,” but rather than just being relegated to a single program, avant-garde cinema permeated the rest of the fest, most exemplarily in the great short + feature combination of Laura Kraning’s Landforms and Julian Castronovo’s Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued. Kraning’s short contrasts a paleontological kaleidoscope of rapid-fire images of fossils with the accumulation of plastics collecting on rocky riverbanks, creating a terrifying meditation on what humanity will ultimately leave behind. Castronovo’s debut Debut, similarly, is about found objects. In this case, Castronovo’s archeology is both personal and forged, relayed to the viewer through a third-person investigative narrator going through Castronovo’s detailed journals after his disappearance. Debut is a desktop film about physical material, transposing the documentary tools of Sans Soleil and F for Fake onto a Macbook as Castronovo turns his own struggle to make a film into a three-figure microbudget thriller.
Like its offshoot festival, New/Next, MdFF is good at highlighting exciting debuts from the independent space. While it was an inconvenient quirk this year that the two festivals happened within a month of each other, it did not inhibit programming for MdFF beyond some difficult decisions for Baltimore filmmakers (“That was painful, especially with the local ones,” Mohr recounts). In the case of William Means’ Junkie the timing turned out to be perfect, as the film had only premiered two weeks before at AFI Fest. Means blends autobiographical details from his life and that of his star, Rocky Shay. Means is the child of an addict and Shay recovered a number of years ago; the comedy-thriller follows Stevie (Shay) after she busts out of rehab and tries to embark on one last (obviously doomed) job to finally get out of town. While the bones of the plot might read as cliche, the specificity of Means’ drugged-out, culturally tense rural Georgia and the humanity that Shay brings to Stevie make Junkie shine. It’s a film made of meth and mud, expertly walking the tightrope of a story that naturally pulls between a DARE ad and the desire for a happy ending; in the middle, Means finds reality.
Elena Oxman’s Outerlands is another debut following a substance-dependent 30-something with even more genre and narrative ambiguity. In the nascently gentrifying parts of San Francisco, Cass (Asia Kate Dillon) works part-time nannying and serving at a restaurant. One day, they run into a new coworker, Kalli (Louisa Krause), at a laundromat, culminating in a drunken hookup. Subsequently, Kalli asks Cass if they can watch her daughter Ari (Ridley Asha Bateman) for a couple of days while she goes out of town for work. When Kalli starts ghosting Cass about coming back, Outerlands turns into a kind of first-person thriller, with Oxman delicately withholding details (even Cass is something of a puzzle for the audience to unlock) beyond what can be seen right in front of the characters.
Filmed with a confident sense of poetry emerging from the everyday—in particular, some stunning sequences driving around SF at night—Oxman’s feature debut comes from an artist with an already fully-formed sensibility, as she has been making short-form and documentary work for over 25 years. Another extraordinary first feature from a filmmaker who, too, is already a mature artist out of the nominal gate is Tenzin Phuntsog’s Next Life, his first fiction feature that’s part of a constantly evolving set of inquiries into absence and Tibetan diaspora begun when he was denied entry into Tibet while making the landscape film Four Rivers. Next Life opens with a Tibetan doctor visiting Pala (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar), an aging exile who has a pain in his heart that Western medicine cannot explain. His wife Amala (Tseyki Dolma) and son Rigzin (Rigzin Phurpatsang) look on as the doctor takes Pala’s pulse in their sparsely decorated suburban American living room. The sound of blood rushing through Pala’s veins overwhelms the simple image of a hand on an arm, white walls and a barren kitchen table. There is a spiritual flow between things which Phuntsog brings out through his sparse mise-en-scene, highlighting both a pain buried deep in the past and the literally heartbreaking absence felt by the characters who physically cannot connect with their homeland. As Rigzin attempts to get his father’s visa application to Tibet approved by the Chinese embassy, while simultaneously preparing Pala for his passing, Phuntsog gorgeously, tragically explores spiritual possibilities transcending the bureaucracies which hold us back.
Sky Hopinka’s masterful Powwow People is set around a powwow organized by Hopinka and his team. This participatory element is key: Hopinka isn’t trying to explore these gatherings anthropologically but as a living, breathing part of Native culture that continues to live and evolve, culminating in a 30-minute unbroken take of a traditional dance competition. Between dance numbers, MC Ruben Littlehead encourages dancers to catch their breath and get some water. But Hopinka’s camera never takes a break, and Littlehead never gives him a break either, prodding him about where to point the camera or when to turn it off; the cameraman becomes part of the dance, enfolding the act of documentation into the culture itself. Documentaries continue to be one of MdFF’s biggest seat fillers, with music docs like Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard’s I Was Born This Way (about Carl Bean’s legendary hit and his subsequent activist work) and Tom Stern’s Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt drawing some of the biggest crowds of the festival. Both iterate what is usually a stale form: I Was Born This Way employs a mix of archival material and rotoscoped animation, Butthole Surfers uses sequences of puppetry to film out its punk apocrypha—and both are still without distribution. The turnout at MdFF proves how valuable institutions like these can be at bringing works directly to audiences.
MdFF and the Parkway have already expanded these screenings to be outside the space of the festival event itself, too. Weeks ahead of its engagement at the festival, Gaia Bethel-Birch and Ania Flanigan Peña’s The StoryDancer, about legendary Baltimore broadcaster and dance instructor Maria Broom, did a free screening at the Parkway, while other free screenings, talks, demos like CineTech and student field trips to shorts programs are part of the Parkway’s effort to make film accessible to the Baltimore community.
The city will likely never again be as cinema-saturated as it was this fall, with New/Next and the Baltimore International Black Film Festival happening the same weekend at the start of October before, a month later, MdFF took place a block north and a half north of New/Next’s The Charles Theater. MdFF’s move to the fall was the result of a long-term push by Mohr and others made regardless of New/Next’s influence—the latter’s return in 2025 was a question mark until the next year’s edition was announced at their closing night in 2024. At that point MdFF was already well under way in planning their own date change to better plan and coordinate student engagement, the foremost reason why MdFF is now moving to April. Both festivals appear to have come out on top: New/Next has cemented its place as a home for emerging DIY voices with a fledgeling student engagement program, while MdFF does that and more, its more diverse and broader sense of programming reflective of a larger team with larger resources. Baltimore gets to have its Slamdance and its Sundance.
