Woods Hole Film Festival Presents "Bold Films, Bright Futures: 35 Years of Films That Matter:" July 25-Aug. 1

The Woods Hole Film Festival, the oldest film festival on the Cape and Islands, is celebrating its 35th edition with “Bold Films, Bright Futures: 35 Years of Films that Matter”from Saturday, July 25 through Saturday, August 1.

The line-up, culled from nearly 1000 submissions from around the world, were narrowed down to an exciting presentation of independent cinema, with 127 films from 24 countries, including 7 World, 2 North American, and 54 New England premieres by both first-time and veteran filmmakers. Forty festival alums, several of whom have gone on to become Oscar winners or nominees after their films screened at previous festival, are returning to help celebrate the milestone. Of note, is two-time Oscar winner and one-time Oscar nominee Ben Proudfoot whose short documentary The Baddest Speechwriter of All, co-directed by and NBA star Stephen Curry, a profile of 93 year-old Clarence B. Jones, Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer and speechwriter who sacrificed personal security to help shape history (July 30). Proudfoot’s A Concerto is a Conversation won Best Documentary Short at the festival and his Oscar-winning The Last Repair Shop screened in 2023.

The festival’s thematic strands include films and filmmakers from New England—particularly Cape Cod and the Islands—films about music and musicians, and films about science and the environment in conjunction with the festival’s “Bringing Science to the Screen” program. Screenings take place at Redfield Auditorium and Clapp Auditorium and Meigs Room at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, and the Simon Center for the Arts at Falmouth Academy. Panels and workshops take place at the Woods Hole Community Hall.

Besides screenings followed by Q&A’s with filmmakers, festival activities include: a master class on directing and editing documentaries with Filmmaker-in-Residence Lindsay Utz (her Sundance documentary winner, Prime Minister, screened at last year’s festival) on July 27; a panel discussion on July 28 called “From Indie to Oscar” with festival alums who became Oscar nominees or winners, featuring Kate Davis (the festival’s co-founder with Judy Laster) and her husband David Heilbroner (Traffic Stop), Lindsay Utz (editor of American Factory), Doug Blush (20 Feet from Stardom, Period. End of Sentence, and Icarus), and Jason Spingarn-Koff (My Octopus Teacher, Amy, American Factory, Icarus) whose short film The Coral Rescuers screens on July 28, Josh Sheftels (All the Empty Rooms) and Robin Hessman (Executive Producer, Mr. Nobody Against Putin); a workshop on monetizing your film on YouTube led by music documentarian John Edginton on July 30; a panel discussion on June 30th about making climate documentaries in challenging times hosted by PBS Science Correspondent Miles O’Brien, and one on the business of acting, moderated by Angela Peri of Boston Casting, on July 31; an awards ceremony; and evening parties with some of the best live music in New England.

Pre-Festival Special Screening

The festival kicks off Friday, July 24, with an encore screening of You Got Gold: A Celebration of John Prine by Michael J. Warren, tribute to the legendary songwriter that was filmed at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in October 2022 featuring artists such as Bonnie Raitt, Brandi Carlile, Tyler Childers, Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakam, Jason Isbell, and Bob Weir.

Opening night films

The highly anticipated Little Audrey, directed by Michel J. Mailer (Norman Mailer’s son), is the star-studded story of Audrey Santos, a young girl from Worcester, MA, who spent most of her life in a vegetative state following an accidental drowning as a child, only to die at age 23 in 2007. The film stars Aidan Quinn, Robert Wahlberg, Emily VanCamp (Captain America movies, Brothers & Sisters, Revenge), and Jennifer Esposito (Bluebloods, NCIS). Former Filmmaker-in-Residence Tasha van Zandt, whose debut documentary After Antarctica screened in 2022, returns to the festival with A Life Illuminated, part of the Festival’s Film & Science Initiative. The film portrays marine biologist Edie Widder’s exploration of bioluminescence, a phenomenon that decodes the language of light and allows deep-sea life to communicate in complete darkness.

Star turns

Miles Levin, a director with epilepsy who aims to raise epilepsy awareness, assembled an impressive cast for his feature debut, Under the Lights, starring Lake Bell, Nick Offerman, Mark Duplass, and Peter Coyote (August 1). The film features a boy with epilepsy who, to feel normal, goes to his prom knowing that the lights will induce a seizure. Festival alum Michael Gallagher (Funny Story) returns with The Leader, based on the true 1997 story of the "Heaven's Gate" cult whose 39 members committed the largest mass suicide ever to take place on American soil, stars Tim Blake Nelson, Vera Farmiga, and Jim Parsons (July 31). NB Mager also assembled several name actors, including Margaret Cho, Patrick Wilson, and Molly Ringwald, for her feature debut comedy Run Amok, (July 31), based on her previous short film about a high school student who attempts to process the aftermath of a school shooting by staging an elaborate musical about the occurrence.

Films with Massachusetts ties

The festival regularly screens films featuring New England stories and filmmakers; this year many selections are connected to Massachusetts. Luchina Fischer’s The Dads, an expansion on her short documentary by the same name and filmed in and around Massachusetts, follows a group of fathers whose trans and gender expansive children face an impossible choice (July 31). In The Great Experiment directors Stephen Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar consider the results of what George Washington once called “our last great experiment” in democracy, resulting in an epic poem documenting daily political life in the United States from 2017 to 2020 (July 26). Executive producers include Newton filmmaker Anne Marie Stein and Cambridge filmmaker Lyda Kuth. Festival alum Robb Moss (Same River Twice, Containment, Secrecy), chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, returns with his latest feature, The Bend in the River, an exploration of the inexorable flow of aging and the unfinished project of living (July 29). Film editor Henry Hayes, who grew up in Cambridge, edited and produced Katie Jacobs’s feature documentary Artists in Residence, the story of three trailblazing female artists who defied norms by purchasing an apartment building together in Greenwich Village in 1959, prioritizing their art over traditional, gender-coded roles (July 29).

In Thato Rantao Mwosa’s short drama Until Further Notice, a trans African woman in Boston must make an impossible choice after her asylum is denied (July 26). Boston Globe reporter David Abel (Entangled: The Race to Save the Right Whale; In the Whale: The Greatest Fish Story Ever; and Inundation District) and Mark Chesak’s short, The Petal Pusher, is an ode to New York's Penn Station and one of its longest-running businesses (July 29).

Films with Cape and Islands connections are also represented. Husband-and-wife Miriam Louise Arens and Mitchell Arens filmed their narrative feature Heartworm, a sci-fi drama about a bereaved mother who fights to rescue her grief-stricken husband from the virtual technology dominating their world, was filmed entirely on Martha’s Vineyard (July 30). Feature documentaries include Arthur Egeli’s Anne Packard: Artist’s Resolve, about the Provincetown gallery that transformed the now 92-year-old artist’s life (July 26) and Brewster resident Allison Argo’s Forever Home, about two North Carolina dreamers who are revolutionizing animal care through groundbreaking housing for abused and forgotten animals (July 29).

Short docs include: Fishing Lessons, shot in West Falmouth, in which director Guy Kozak seeks advice from three experienced fishermen on his first anniversary (July 27); Mimi Malicoat Bois’s On the Tide, an insider's perspective on the cultural, community, and environmental importance of aquaculture in Wellfleet (August 1; and Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage by Liz McGregor follows the eponymous organization’s founder Susan Baur as she gathered a group of old women to battle pollution in the ponds on Cape Cod (August 1).

Adult Swim fans will appreciate Buzzard’s Bay, an animated coming of age short from animator and Buzzards Bay resident Torey Strahl (The Colbert Report, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) and Brookline-based comedian/writer Elena Ridker (Broad City). The two also voice the characters, along with former Saturday Night Live performer Steven Castillo (August 1).

Bringing Science to the Screen

The Bringing Science to the Screen program, part of the Festival’s Film & Science Initiative, spotlights both urgent environmental challenges and scientific research. Marilyn Ness’s feature documentary The Endless Frontier is an intimate, urgent portrait of three scientists working to solve everything from diseases to climate change, while revealing the growing threat to the American research engine (July 28). Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman won the Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for Nuisance Bear, set in Churchill, Manitoba, the self-proclaimed “Polar Bear Capital of the World” (July 30). It follows the uneasy coexistence between bears and humans in a landscape where polar bears are constantly watched, redirected, and commodified. In Nilgiris: A Shared Wilderness director Sandesh Kadur explores India’s first UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, shaped by ancient natural forces and recent human impact, through breathtaking 4K visuals of leopards, gaur, and hornbills (July 25). The short doc Ani Liu: Eye Heart Womb, profiles the New York artist (and Harvard and MIT grad) who creates provocative artifacts at the intersection of art, science and technology—from neuroscience to motherhood (July 26). The feature documentary The Last Place on Earth by David Booth Gardner is the thrilling, eight-year journey into the heart of Sumatra’s Leuser Ecosystem that follows a group of extraordinary wildlife activists who risk everything to save this untouched wilderness from the devastation of the illegal palm oil industry.

Films about music

The festival regularly screens films that explore the lives of musicians and the transformative power of music. The Latin rock band Los Lobos will attend the screening of the feature documentary Los Lobos: Native Sons co-directed by festival alum and Oscar-winner Doug Blush and Piero F. Giunti, about the band’s 50-year career (July 26). “Dean of American Rock” critic Robert Christgau wrote extensively about the band, so it’s only fitting that the festival also screens the documentary The Last Critic by Matty Wishnow, a portrait of the influential music critic who shaped the field of rock and pop journalism over six decades through his capsule reviews in The Village Voice, continuing his craft on Substack into his eighties (July 28). The film explores the uncertain future of criticism in a digital age where traditional journalism faces new challenges.

Two short docs about music share filmmaking DNA; they screen together on July 27 in the “Thank You for the Music” shorts program. Acclaimed documentarian Al Maysles reflects on filming the Beatles during their first visit to the United States in Bart Weiss’s Rolling Film, Rocking History, Al Maysles Captures the Beatles. Nick Canfield, who served as cinematographer on several Al Maysles’s films, tells the story of the iconic electronic music group Yello in his latest film, OH YEAH!, exploring the 1985 iconic song's cultural impact and its enduring place in the American psyche. Also screening in the program is The Baker’s Dozen by Matt Michaud, which depicts the predicament of The Baker Thomas Band, whose 15-year residency at the storied music venue “TOAD” in Cambridge is interrupted when the venue suddenly closes. A year later, the musicians reunite amid uncertain times at the city’s remaining musical sanctuary.

The festival is presented by Liam Maguire’s Pub and 88.5 mvyradio and supported by grants from The Cape Cod Foundation, Martha’s Vineyard Bank Charitable Foundation, the Woods Hole Foundation, and the Falmouth Fund of the Cape Cod Foundation and the Cape Cod Foundation. Festival sponsors include Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Marine Biological Laboratory, Cape & Coast Bank, Cape Cod 5, The Steamship Authority, OceanCape, Tree House Lodge, Sands of Time Motel, Iris Hotel, and more.

Tickets are $18 in advance, $20 on day-of-show; students and military, $10. Discounted member tickets, festival passes, and ticket packages are also available. Passes and tickets are available at www.woodsholefilmfestival.org. The Old Woods Hole Fire Station (72 Water Street) box office opens July 6. Call 508-495-3456 or email info@woodsholefilmfestival.org.