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.”

Weekly screenings will be shown on Wednesdays at 6:30 at UMass Amherst Isenberg School of Management Room 137 (unless otherwise stated)

February 19th – Borderland | The Line Within (2024, Pamela Yates, United States & Mexico, 110min, in English & Spanish w/ English subtitles) (Screening at AMHERST CINEMA at 7:00PM, Q&A with director Pamela Yates and producer Paco de Onís)

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) (Q&A with director Nariman Massoumi)

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) - Change of Venue: ILC S240

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)