Documenting Dissent

The Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is pleased to present the thirty-second season of the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival, on the theme of “Documenting Dissent,” showcasing a diverse and international array of new and recent documentary films. Our campuses today, like countries across the globe, are roiling in various forms of controversy. Political debates about gender identity, race/class/caste, immigration, and colonialism are increasingly mobilized to divide populations along partisan lines and fuel authoritarian movements. In cinema, documentarians engage such issues directly, with experimental and lyric creativity. The films and directors featured in this year’s MMFF document dissent: they tell their stories, center voices, and reclaim personal, social, and political experience in opposition to the status quo. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, we are proud to offer our diverse communities art that “tells the truth, exposes evil, and seeks, with beauty and for beauty, to set the world right.”

Festival Schedule:

February 19th – Borderland | The Line Within (2024, Pamela Yates, United States & Mexico, 110min, in English & Spanish w/ English subtitles) (Screened at AMHERST CINEMA at 7:00PM)

February 26th – Life at the Stream (1989, Peter Rocha, German Democratic Republic, 30 min, in German w/ English subtitles), Pouring Water on Troubled Oil (2023, Nariman Massoumi, United Kingdom & Iran, 26min, in English w/ English subtitles)

March 5th- No Other Land (2024, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal & Rachel Szor, Palestine/Israel, 92 min, in Arabic, Hebrew & English w/ English subtitles)

March 12th – Anima: My Father’s Dresses (2022, Uli Decker, Germany, 95 min, in German w/ English subtitles)

March 26th – My Imaginary Country (2022, Patricio Guzmán, Chile, 83 min, in Spanish w/ English subtitles)

April 2nd – Green Border (2023, Agnieszka Holland, Poland & Belarus, 152 min, in English, Polish, Arabic & French w/ English subtitles)

April 9th – Dahomey (2024, Mati Diop, France & Benin, 68 min, French, Fon & English w/ English subtitles)

April 16th – Sugarcane (2024, Julian Brave NoiseCat & Emily Kassie, Canada & United States, 107 min, in English & Secwepemctsin w/ English subtitles)

April 23rd – Selfie (2019, Agostino Ferrente, Italy, 76 min, in Italian w/ English subtitles)

Fest Date: February 19 - April 23, 2025

Locations:
Amherst Cinema, 28 Amity Street, Amherst, MA 01002
UMass Amherst Isenberg School of Management, 121 Presidents Drive, Amherst, MA 01003

Click here for more information.