“Another year, another New/Next” looks to become a certainty in Baltimore. After last year’s inaugural festival, it wasn’t known if New/Next Film Festival was a one-off event or if the Maryland Film Festival would return from hiatus. In 2024, both happened a couple months and a block apart in Station North, and both announced on their closing nights that they will be back for 2025. For the foreseeable future, Baltimore has two tentpole, unjuried independent film festivals; what is not certain is how they are going to interplay with each other as establishments, rather than events with question marks attached. MdFF bookended itself with speeches from Maryland’s governor and Baltimore’s mayor, while New/Next kept it less formal, opening and closing with remarks from the fest’s main sponsor (local NPR affiliate WYPR) as well as the fest’s co-founder and lead programmer, Eric Allen Hatch. MdFF, as I reported back in May, came back with institutional force; New/Next is here by sheer force of will. 

This year’s lineup was massively expanded: the inaugural festival hosted 75 films as opposed to this year’s 126 (23 features and 52 shorts vs. 37 features and 89 shorts), a 68% increase taking over all five screens of The Charles Theater (from four last year) for three full days plus an opening night. Over 200 people were there representing films, and Hatch noted that while the fest had the budget to pay for and accommodate for one person for each feature, that was not the case for short filmmakers—meaning New/Next was seen as worth it to the vast majority of industry attendees to travel to Baltimore on their own dime. It verged on too much. Indeed, it would be physically impossible to see everything (nor is it wholly necessary), and despite having spent 12 hours a day at The Charles I keep running into friends around town who went to multiple screenings and never once crossed paths in the theater’s short hallway. Having too many good offerings is probably the best problem a film festival could have, especially one only in its sophomore edition, and it’ll be up to subsequent ones to see how much more the fest can stretch its legs out, what sort of turnout it can maintain or bolster through playing films more times or how many calendar days it can sustainably expand to. 

There’s two immediate functions to a festival like New/Next: bringing people and films into the city, and what the city can project back out. To that first, New/Next brought in low-budget festival favorites like Joel Potrykus’ Tribeca premiere Vulcanizadora (2024), Carson Lund’s debut Eephus (2024) (playing simultaneously at NYFF) and Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka (2023), still running the fest circuit after premiered at Cannes over a year ago. New/Next is probably the only opportunity for any of these films to play The Charles, currently the only first-run theater in town focusing on independent and international cinema. 

Chloé Robichaud’s third feature, Days of Happiness (2023), was the standout of films in the limbo between festival screenings and eventual streaming releases. Robichaud was one of the sharpest new voices in Québécois cinema in the 2010s, and despite a limited release in the provinces Days hasn’t made waves it should have abroad. This could be in part because of how closely the logline mirrors another film about a lesbian conductor running through interpersonal and professional conflict while preparing for a climatic sequence centered on Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. But any textual parallels with TÁR (2022) end there—and where that film plays off the “Adagietto” as a winking reference to Death in Venice (1971), Days of Happiness seeks to explore how the act of conducting it works as a form of artistic, emotional expression, taking music—and art—seriously as processes by which we understand ourselves. Days of Happiness is held firmly together by Sophie Desmarais’ central performance, reuniting with Robichaud over a decade after their work together on Sarah Prefers to Run (2013), for a film largely made up of Desmarais reacting to the world around her. 

As for projecting out, Corey Hughes’ first feature Your Final Meditation (2024) was New/Next’s sole feature produced in Baltimore. Starring Midnight Sun frontwoman Hanna Olivegren as Jodiiie, a woman running through a VR guided meditation which slowly devolves towards a destructive conclusion, Your Final Meditation’s digitally generated imagery uses 360 cameras to create a hybrid reality-meets-video-games aesthetic as disorienting and alienating as it is purely mesmerizing. But while Jodiiie slips deeper and deeper into the internal world of VR, her physical reality is at risk: the building she lives in has been sold. Filmed in the warehouse space Floristree in the H&H Arts Building in downtown Baltimore in the final weeks before new owners took over from displaced tenants, Your Final Meditation is also a document of a quickly disappearing DIY Baltimore. Much of Jodiiie’s room was “assembled from furniture, artwork, objects and plants that had lived in that space over twenty years and been passed along between artists and musicians that lived there,” according to Hughes. 

The film also stands as a showcase for the production talent established over the city’s scene in the last decade: Hughes was a regular cinematographer for both Theo Anthony and Marnie Ellen Hertzler, and Your Final Meditation was produced by Jonna Mckone (All Light Everywhere [2021], Squeegee [2024]) and Daniel April (The Sweet East [2023]), with cinematography from Tyler Davis (Strawberry Mansion [2021]), production design by Becca Morin (Unedited Footage of a Bear [2014], Rat Film [2016]) and VFX by Meredith Moore (Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers [2023]). What also links these local artists together is the production company MEMORY which, while L.A.-based, made a second home in Baltimore at MdFF with the likes of Anthony’s Rat Film and Hertzler’s Crestone (2020). MEMORY was at New/Next this year presenting Physician, Heal Thyself, Asher Penn’s debut documentary about controversial Canadian doctor and writer Gabor Maté. MEMORY also chose New/Next as the venue for one of its tenth anniversary celebrations (DJ’d by Dan Deacon, of course), further demonstrating New/Next’s lineage with the filmmaking community from MdFF’s heyday. 

By independent film standards, these are established faces; who’s next? The first place to look is always the shorts programs, where two stuck me above all the others. In GANGBANG (2023) by Christian Meola, a group of shirtless, conventionally attractive young men of all different classifications stand around a bed, smiling into the camera, in a shot that holds and holds far beyond comfort until everyone starts laughing. The images begin to fade over each other into smiling close-ups or the men arranged in different collections of poses around the bed. It is a gay porno without porn, only the anticipation of the display of bodily pleasure that will never come. In the Late Night program, Living Reality (2024) by Philip Thompson starts as a fake 2000s sitcom, blending a How I Met Your Mother cadence with the haunting texture of dying DV cameras. People quip for audience reactions, but when Thompson’s character Theo chimes in, his disaffection is met with the dead air of the space between laugh tracks. Theo leaves the pristine three walls of the initial set and goes back to his cramped apartment, decorated with a mattress on the floor and an old TV. The images Theo sees from his end of TV reality are an inverse sitcom serving the same escapist function, down and dirty verite of young people living in “real” apartments and having “real” conversations. The grain of the images falls apart as the camera zooms in and out in low lighting, turning banal interactions into a whirlwind fantasia of ordinary youth. 

The best film of the fest appeared out of the blue via a FilmFreeway submission. “It’s a rare treat for a film programmer to come across a discovery as strong as Softshell (2024) in their call for entries,” Hatch writes in his programming notes. “But I wasn’t dreaming, and Softshell is the real deal.” I agree: Jinho Myung’s first feature is reminiscent of the lowkey formal confidence and delicate, humanistic texture of Andrew Bujalski in Funny Ha Ha (2002) paired with on-the-New-York-streets tonality of Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008) (with a couple of narrative nods to the latter, to boot). That is not to say Myung is imitative. Instead, his style feels intuitive, running off good hunches about emotions of estrangement running between the lines of conversation, conveying feelings in ways that words can’t, but sometimes film can if done right. Following a Thai-American brother-sister pair through their early adulthood in the wake of their mother’s death, Softshell often abandons conventional coverage or temporality for multi-screen narrative condensation; overlays to present texting on screen are replaced with diptych images where we see the messaging characters in the totality of their bodies in an environment, precisely the opposite of how they exist in a messaging app. Jinho Myung found New/Next, and New/Next found him; hopefully many more are about to find out about both.