33rd Woods Hole Film Festival to Run July 27-August 11

The Woods Hole Film Festival, the oldest film festival on the Cape and Islands, announces the line-up for its 33rd edition, running Saturday, July 27 through Saturday, August 3, followed by online screenings of many films from August 4-11. The nearly 1000 submissions were narrowed down to a program of 47 feature-length and 73 short dramas, comedies, documentaries, and animation from 19 countries—with 6 world, 2 US, and 59 New England premieres by both first-time and veteran filmmakers.

Besides screenings followed by filmmaker Q&A’s, activities include master classes, workshops, panel discussions, an awards ceremony, and parties with some of the best live music in New England. The festival’s hallmark thematic strands include films and filmmakers from New England, films about music and musicians, films about science in conjunction with the Festival’s “Bringing Science to the Screen” program, and films about activism. Screenings take place at Redfield Auditorium and Cornelia Clapp Auditorium in Woods Hole and the Simon Center for the Arts at Falmouth Academy. Panels and workshops take place in the Woods Hole Community Hall.

Opening night films

Multi-award-winning filmmaker Dawn Porter’s (John Lewis: Good Trouble) noteworthy documentary Luther: Never Too Much (and produced by Jamie Foxx and Colin Firth) recaps Luther Vandross’s Grammy® award-winning musical career, while exploring his personal life, health struggles, and a lifelong battle to earn the respect that his music deserved. Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s Porcelain War, winner of the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, profiles three artists from Ukraine who chose to stay behind and fight, armed with their art, their cameras, and for the first time in their lives, their guns. In Tyrrell Shaffner’s narrative film Katie’s Mom, the character played by Aaron Dominguez (Selena Gomez’s love interest in season 2 of “Only Murders in the Building”) gets seduced by his girlfriend’s mother, who tells the story from her point of view in a twist on the Mrs. Robinson character in The Graduate.

Star turns

Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”) stars in a pair of films: Haroula Rose’s All Happy Families, a charming comedy about a dysfunctional family gathering in Chicago (August 3), and Jane Weinstock’s Three Birthdays, about a family wrestling with revolutionary ideas around sex, race, and class in the 1970s (August 1). Veteran independent animator and festival alum Bill Plympton returns to the Festival with Slide, a genre-bending new feature that presents a heady concoction of elements from Westerns, comedies, musicals, and creature features, brought to life by Plympton’s personal, idiosyncratic vision of backwoods America (August 2).

Films with New England ties

Several narrative feature films are set in New England. Vermont filmmaker and festival alum Jay Craven’s (Where the Rivers Flow North) latest film, Lost Nation (produced through his Semester Cinema program), charts the intersecting journeys of Vermont’s founding father Ethan Allen and early Vermont poet Lucy Terry Prince, whose poem “Bars Fight” is the first known work of African American literature (July 31). Husband-and-wife Matt Cascella and Jennifer Cordery moved to Portland, Maine from New York a few years ago, inspiring them to write Hangdog, about a couple who moved to Portland from New York (July 29). It stars Catherine Chilton (Wanda Bell in “Orange is the New Black,” “Stranger Things,” “Insecure”) and Desmin Bourges (“You’re the Worst” and the upcoming Season 4 of "Only Murders in the Building"). In Boston-based filmmaker Spencer Cohen’s The Compatriots, filmed entirely in Massachusetts and making its world premiere, two college age, same-sex platonic friends plan to marry when one of them faces deportation due to their undocumented status (August 2). In the mystery/thriller Crookedfinger, by Julia Halperin & Jason Cortlund, a woman returns to her Cape Cod childhood home after her parents’ sudden death and is forced to work with her estranged brother as they settle their parents affairs. A program of short films, all made in Massachusetts, includes the New England premiere of The Day Keeper, shot in Woods Hole at the Nobska Lighthouse by frequent festival participant and Boston filmmaker Mark Kiefer, screens July 30.

Bringing Science to the Screen

The "Bringing Science to the Screen" program, part of the Festival’s Film and Science Initiative, includes a substantial number of science-focused films. Among the feature films: Hunt for the Oldest DNA, a documentary by Canadian filmmaker Niobe Thompson about scientists who discovered the oldest DNA ever found (in dirt, not fossils) that reveals the genes of long-extinct creatures in the Arctic (August 1); The Wonder and the Worry, which follows the careers of former National Geographic Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Johns and his young, freelance photographer daughter who examine the soul of journalism and its role in preserving the planet (July 31); and a work-in-progress screening of Follow the Journey, narrated by Ted Danson and directed by Martha’s Vineyard residents Liz Witham and Ken Wentworth, who followed a group of endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, including seven mothers and their newborn calves, from Florida to the Canadian Maritimes (July 28).

Notable shorts (part of “The Blue Between Us” on August 1) include: Harvard Professor and Black Hole Initiative Director (and festival alum) Peter Galison’s Light at the Edge of the Universe: The Black Hole Explorer (with colleagues Michael Johnson and Chyld King), about a spacecraft that could follow the quest to understand black holes; Princess Daazhraii Johnson’s Gath & K’iyh: Listen to Heal, a poetic visual exploration of a community-led creative arts project, with cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing a critical role, aimed at better understanding and restoring our relationship with the Lower Tanana dialect concepts of gath (king salmon) and k’iyh (birch) relatives in an effort to understand climate change in Alaska; and Kim Lowe’s The Bee, which profiles Bill Perkins, a beekeeper in Boston who shares his knowledge and love of bees with his community, much like a bee spreading pollen.

Films about music

Each year the Festival screens a dynamic array of films dedicated to the power of music and the captivating stories of the musicians who bring it to life. Don Hardy’s Linda Perry: Let It Die Here profiles one of the most recognizable artists of the last 30 years, with her signature hat, attitude, and chart-topping hit “What’s Up” with her band 4 Non Blondes. She has since made a name for herself as a Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer for artists such as Adele, Christina Aguilera, Brandi Carlisle, Miley Cyrus, Celine Dion, Ariana Grande, Alicia Keys, Dolly Parton, Pink and Gwen Stefani (July 29). Augusta Palmer’s The Blues Society re-evaluates the 1960s through the lens of the Memphis Country Blues Festival that included Blues masters such as Furry Lewis and Robert Wilkins, who had attained fame in the 1920s but were living in obscurity by the 1960s, and a group of white artists from the North and South who created a celebration of African American music in a highly segregated city (July 30). In Jeff Toye’s The Opener Grammy winner Jason Mraz invites singer-songwriter and TikTok phenom Philip Labes to open for him during his tour, after discovering Labes’s heartfelt and witty songs.

Films about activism

Films that illuminate the voices, struggles, and triumphs of social consciousness and civic engagement are often a frequent theme at the festival. The aftereffects of Trinity, the world’s first nuclear bomb detonated in New Mexico one month before the bombing of Hiroshima, has been in the news a lot lately. Lois Lipman’s First We Bombed New Mexico, profiles inspiring Hispanic cancer survivor Tina Cordova, who catalyzed a movement seeking compensation for families—mostly Hispanics and Native Americans—who suffer multi-generational cancers tied to that bomb and who continue to be ignored (July 31). Similarly, in Sugarcane, a gripping investigation of the unmarked graves at an Indian residential school in Canada that unearths secrets below and above ground, igniting a reckoning in the lives of survivors and their descendants, including the film’s co-director, Julian Brave NoiseCat (July 30). Gabriel Francis Paz Goodenough’s The Body Politic profiles Brandon Scott, a young mayor in Baltimore elected amid the George Floyd uprising, who grew up during Baltimore’s most troubling years and introduced an ambitious plan for violence reduction and police reform that he promises will lower the city’s murder rate (August 2).

Master classes are by: Filmmaker-in-Residence Doug Blush, an award-winning director, producer, editor, writer and cinematographer with over 200 feature and television credits, including executive producing festival entries Champions of the Golden Valley (August 3), First We Bombed New Mexico, and Counted Out, and a number of Academy Award winning documentaries, such as 20 Feet from Stardom, The Elephant Whisperers, and Period. End Of Sentence (July 29); John de Graaf (whose film Stewart Udall: The Politics of Beauty screens on closing night), a documentary filmmaker with over 40 films, 15 of which have received national primetime PBS broadcasts (August 2); and actor, director, producer and author Christy Cashman (July 30). Panel discussions include “The State of Independent Film” hosted by Women in Film and Video New England on August 1, and “What Do You Want From Film Critics?” hosted by the Boston Society of Film Critics on August 3.

“Most of the Festival’s ‘Dinner and a Movie’ screenings sold out this winter and spring, so we are anticipating a particularly robust festival,” says Founder and Executive Director Judy Laster. “More filmmakers are also expected to attend in-person, a return to a time when they could regularly engage with audience members at screenings or just by walking down the street.”

The festival is supported by grants from the Mass Cultural Council, Martha’s Vineyard Savings Bank Charitable Foundation, Woods Hole Foundation, Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, and the Falmouth Fund of the Cape Cod Foundation. Festival sponsors include Woodwell Climate Research Center, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Marine Biological Laboratory, 88.7 mvyradio, Cape Cod 5, Falmouth Road Race, Cape Clasp, Tree House Lodge, Sands of Time Motel, Liam Maguires, YouthInk and more.

Individual tickets are $16 general admission and $12 for members. Full festival passes and tickets packages are also available, and there are discounts for members. Purchased tickets and passes at www.woodsholefilmfestival.org or at the box office, located at the Old Woods Hole Fire Station (72 Water Street). Call 508-495-3456 or email info@woodsholefilmfestival.org for more information.