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Ramona and the Ballad of Juan Diego

About two hours east of Los Angeles, thousands gather each spring in Hemet for The Ramona Pageant, the oldest continuously staged outdoor play in the United States. The production draws from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, a cultural force that helped shape California’s identity and spotlighted injustices against Native Americans. Following the pageant’s centennial, the film tracks Eli Santana, who plays Alessandro, as he investigates the real history behind the fiction, including the 1880s killing of Juan Diego. In museum archives, the team discovers a rare wax cylinder that preserves the killer’s testimony. They seek out descendants of Juan Diego and his wife, Ramona Lubo, and record a new wax-cylinder statement to restore her missing voice. The journey culminates at the pageant, where descendants and Bird Singers gather, and Eli debuts The Ballad of Juan Diego, reframing a California myth for the next hundred years.

Ramona and the Ballad of Juan Diego

NR 2026
In Need of Seawater

A poetic documentary that traces the origins of writer Mark Anthony Thomas’s creative voice. Through a cast of actors, a young featured poet, and rarely seen historical footage, the film revisits the poems that shaped his early years and the questions that still echo decades later. Blending performance, memory, and cultural history, In Need of Seawater becomes a meditation on personal becoming—how identity is forged through trials, loss, and revelation—and how one artist’s search for truth mirrors America’s ongoing fight for expression, dignity, and justice.

In Need of Seawater

NR 2026
Are The Stars Alive?

Are The Stars Alive is a 3 minute, 35mm visual poem about the importance of curiosity and personal growth. It follows a woman who begins to trust her own instincts as she tries to understand the complexities of the universe, proving the answer to many of our questions lies within us. It also pays tribute to pioneering women, like astronomer Maria Mitchell (who the film is loosely based off of), and the women who painstakingly hand colored George Melies’ masterpieces from the early days of cinema. These women painted stories in the stars, and laid the foundation for all of us, allowing our curiosity to bloom. By hand cutting and coloring our film, frame by frame, we hope that we can honor the nameless women who inspired us to become storytellers and rebels.

Are The Stars Alive?

NR 2026
Sorry

A portrait of three young women: Luna Alyaan, a young Gaza violinist, killed by an Elbit drone; Eden Golan, a Zionist singer who represented Israel at 2024’s Eurovision in Malmo; and Greta Thunberg, who lead protests at Eurovision that year. A dark satire of Israel’s weaponization of song for hasbara (propaganda) purposes, Sorry uses humour and pop culture to create a mash-up agit-prop in support of the ongoing Eurovision boycott and the Dump Elbit campaign. (Inspired by Toronto Palestine Film Festival’s Gaza Lives tribute to artists lost in the genocide).

Sorry

NR 2026