Showing film results: From 6 to 16
Mixtape for Stom Sogo doesn’t feel like a documentary trying to explain its subject. It feels more like someone sitting with unresolved thoughts and letting them unfold. Directed by Adrian Goycoolea, the film is framed around a response to the last email he received from his friend Stom Sogo before he died. This is not a biography or a structured story. It’s a conversation with someone who isn’t there anymore, full of hesitation, memories, and questions that don’t get answered.
The Competition component of the Spring 2026 New Jersey Film Festival has just concluded! Overall, we had a good festival this year. We had a few screenings that were very well attended and a bunch with lower turnouts but that happens every festival for a variety of reasons. The in-person show attendance was about the same as our Festival last year, but the online viewership is what has kept us afloat financially since COVID broke in 2020. All the Official Selection works of the Spring 2026 New Jersey Film Festival were selected by a panel of judges including media professionals, journalists, students, and academics. These judges selected the 33 finalists which were publicly screened at our Festival. The finalists were selected from over 600 works submitted by filmmakers from around the world. In addition, the judges chose the Prize Winners in conjunction with the Festival Director. Here below are the winners of the Festival.
With Send Help, screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift have taken the basic setup of Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away (and its awful Madonna-starring, Guy Ritchie directed remake) and given it a gender swap. Here it's a lowly female employee who finds herself stranded on a desert island with her male boss. Much of Send Help explores the same class and sexual tensions as Wertmuller's film, but with Sam Raimi in the director's chair we know things are going to get a little crazy at some point. And, boy, do they!
Freeing Juanita, directed by Sebastián Lasaosa Rogers, is not the kind of documentary you watch and walk away from unchanged. It stays with you long after the credits roll. At its heart, this is a film about one woman, wrongfully imprisoned. But as you watch it unfold, you realize it’s also about so much more: a broken immigration system, the erasure of Indigenous voices, and the extraordinary strength of family and community.
With Summer of Sam, Spike Lee suggested that in 1977 there was nowhere crazier than New York. With The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho asks Lee to hold his beer. If you thought '77 NYC was something, wait till you experience the Brazil of that year. In opening text, Mendonça Filho describes that era in his nation's troubled history as "a time of great mischief," and The Secret Agent is a gleefully mischievous movie. Like several recent high profile South American films, including last year's Brazilian drama I'm Still Here, it is concerned with the corruption that was rife under the military dictatorship. But just as Lee did for the bankruptcy era Big Apple, Mendonça Filho displays a fond nostalgia for the energy that can be created by dangerous times. There is much in The Secret Agent that is shocking, and it reminds us of the evil that is allowed to flourish in corrupt societies, but it's also heart-poundingly thrilling.
Now in its 38th year, the United States Super 8mm Film + Digital Video Festival is the largest and longest running juried festival of its kind in North America. The festival encourages any genre (including animation, documentary, personal, narrative, and experimental) made on Super 8mm/8mm film, Hi 8mm/8mm, or digital video. The festival will be held Online and In-Person at Rutgers University on February 21+22, 2026.
Here is the 2026 United States Super 8 Film & Digital Video Festival Video Panel with Filmmakers A. Rosalie Chandler, Dan Lopez, Marco Mazzi, Alan Halls, David O. Rogers and Festival Director Al Nigrin.
As a quadriplegic Marine veteran, the filmmaker set out to tell a story that is both deeply personal and universally resonant. Sum Function follows a group of friends, all living with severe physical disabilities, as they confront battles more personal than war itself—on and off the wheelchair rugby court. At its core, this is a film about resilience, connection, and the power of community in a world not built for us.
(BLAIRSTOWN, NJ) -- Roy's Hall presents a screening of the original Friday The 13th film on Friday, February 13, 2026 at 7:30pm. The 1980 film, which kick-started the Slasher sub-genre, is regarded as one of the best known slasher films in history and was shot in and around the Blairstown, NJ area.
Don't miss Shorts Program #2 at the 2026 New Jersey Film Festival this Friday, February 13! Here is the line-up.
