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Back Already? The Maryland Film Festival Settles Into Its New Spring Dates
Every Contact Leaves a Trace Only five months after its 2025 edition, the Maryland Film Festival hosted its 27th installment from April 8-12. The Parkway Theater on the corner of North & Charles is set to be a permanent home for Baltimore’s longest-running independent film festival, which will now be held annually in the spring. The shakeup caused by the festival going on hiatus in 2023—which caused former MdFF programmer Eric Allen Hatch to launch his own festival, New/Next, which now runs regularly in the fall—is finally starting to settle, leaving Baltimore with two marquee festivals for independent cinema.
The 26th MdFF, despite the competition for regional premieres a month after New/Next, still had a year and half to build up a robust and diverse program. This year’s edition had a noticeably more focused program, with most films pretty neatly fitting into a set of categories, like low-budget debuts, local works, documentaries (predominantly issue films from the Sundance pool), and experimental work. On a miniature scale, MdFF feels like it is starting to sidebar-ize its program, which appears to be working to attract disparate and diverse audiences in town—like how, for instance, it’s hosted for a third year in a row an entirely queer-focused off-site at Current Space, a little over a mile south of MdFF’s main events in Station North. These changes suggest that MdFF is recapturing the large audience it had before all of its shakeups in the last decade, while also signaling its intent to evolve into more than just a hub for DIY and indie cinema.
Since its relaunch in 2024, MdFF has been striving to turn the Parkway into a multi-modal space, and this year boasts a new retractable screen that can allow the stage to host theater, dance, and other performances. It has also placed an emphasis on emerging technology on top of emerging cinema, with the fest’s “CineTech” program highlighting everything from VR to interactive movies. In continuing the push outside of traditional cinematic bounds, this year’s MdFF also featured a “verticals” program on the pre-fest preview day, playing made-for-phone fare on the Parkway’s main screen in its historic, vaudevillian Theater 1. While outreach toward the ever-expanding world of “content” might seem important for what feels like an increasingly atavistic type of cultural institution, elevating works meant for social media to the space of a movie theater immediately makes me feel like the fight to keep cinema alive might already be over and lost. That feeling, though, was largely alleviated by MdFF’s proper opening night that packed the Parkway.
Something that has been rattling me since attending Sundance this January is that, despite that fest’s program being largely not to my tastes, the films that are shown there do still have mass appeal; they are the kinds of films that most people would watch if watching films was still a cultural reflex (rather than TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, et cetera). The obvious problem with Sundance is that people have to come to it, and come to it with a lot of money, both for its massive financial role in indie spaces as well as the exorbitant cost of attending. Instead, an institution like MdFF acts as a local foundation to keep cinema alive, both as an event to go to and a casual hobby. To a degree, it doesn’t matter that the broad strokes of MdFF’s programming is not to my palate, because they are doing a good job at turning out Baltimoreans and keeping them excited about cinema. For every piece of “vertical content,” there are many more that do the work to maintain the indie pipeline, from MdFF’s annual closed-door filmmakers’ conference—allowing professionals and newcomers alike the chance to be candid with each other about the state of affairs—to the Parkway’s first annual pitch fest, as well as a new artist residency program.
These are part of MdFF’s efforts to maintain a continuous community of filmmaking that it has helped foster for decades. An example of this dedication still going strong is former Baltimorean Lynne Sachs’s return to the fest with two films: a 25th anniversary screening of her look at the Catonsville Nine, Investigation of a Flame (which played alongside AJ Schnack’s searing look at current crackdowns in press freedoms, Escalation), as well as her latest work of experimental documentary Every Contact Leaves a Trace. A forensic exhuming of the hundreds upon hundreds of business cards the director has collected over the years, Sachs’s film takes a look at these “little memory devices” that exist as documents of “people who appeared to want to get in touch, and yet, [they] did not.” With the physical cards as a starting point, Sachs is able to tangibly investigate the limits of memory and how impossible it is to know people based solely on assumptions.
It won’t be lost on anyone attending MdFF who follows American avant-garde that Sachs’s work played in a lineup that also featured Barbara Forever, which paid homage to the pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who was the subject and collaborator on Sachs’s most famous film, A Month of Single Frames. Brydie O’Connor’s doc on Hammer goes beyond the typical biographical send-up, and instead incorporates Hammer’s own slippery, self-reflexive, and extraordinarily playful form to paint a moving portrait of the late, great filmmaker. Still, while O’Connor’s tribute is just about the best version of what this kind of film can be, it does leave me wishing I was watching a Barbara Hammer film instead. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and Barbara Forever could easily be a gateway for many to seek out the works of one of America’s greatest filmmakers of the latter half of the twentieth century. And, as Sachs put it in her intro to Every Contact Leaves a Trace, MdFF has “always been a risk-taking festival” which is “really about finding new things” and “encouraging adventures in cinema.”
To my mind, the best adventure one can have at MdFF is attending “Diverging Forms” shorts program, which showcases experimental cinema and often features some of the festival’s best work. One of the standouts this year was Zachary Epcar’s Sinking Feeling, which is oneirically constructed from 16mm footage of modern office buildings stitched over sultry narration of a man and woman describing being stuck on a train in the Transbay Tube. Their descent under the earth and water is viscerally recounted, dredging up a latent psychosexual energy hiding within the otherwise ordinary space of a commute, finding textural ways to visualize the unseeable.
In Elisabeth Subrin’s Manal Issa, 2024 (also featured in “Diverging Forms”), visibility is a political choice. The film is a follow-up to the director’s 2022 film Maria Schneider, 1983, wherein Subrin restages Schneider’s infamous Cinéma cinémas interview challenging the structures and practices of the film industry. In Manal Issa, 2024, the French Lebanese actress that played Schneider answers the same questions from a Beirut cafe, filmed in long takes with the actress’s voiceover standing in for her physical presence—the only visible traces of her are a cup of coffee, a glass of water, and a cigarette on the table in front of an empty chair, objects which are gently rearranged during the black-screen interstices between questions. Issa’s answers apply not just a feminist critique to the film industry, but an anti-colonial one, with the effects of Western imperialism literally looming over the conversation as the sounds of explosions disrupt the peaceful street scenes out the window. Issa says that it is Israeli jets performing sonic booms over the city to intimidate the people. A final title card says that mere hours after the conversation, Israel bombed southern Lebanon, brutally killing hundreds in less than a day. The distance, both literally imposed by Subrin’s remote directing from London and the choice not to have Issa on screen, creates a “here and elsewhere” (à la Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s seminal essay film about the impossible gap between Western society and the people they colonize) by choosing to emphasize precisely what’s absent.
Absence, too, is at the heart of Harry Sheriff’s Misper, MdFF’s closing night film. Set in an aging hotel on seaside Britain that is barely being kept afloat by the few old people that still stay there, Misper starts as a Greek Weird Wave-esque dreary comedy through the eyes of hotel worker Leonard (Samuel Blenkin), then turns into a muted thriller after his work crush, Elle (Emily Carey), stops showing up or answering calls. In a brisk 73 minutes, Sheriff and co-writer Laurence Tratalos are able to weave a quietly devastating, genre-inflected story through a world of half-connections, media frenzy, and isolation. In the best way possible, Misper is the kind of movie I reach for after a long day working in the service industry. While Misper portrays loneliness through its use of location, the uniquely contemporary aspects of isolation can only be brought to life through the same screens that create them.
Screenlife films are most often employed with emphasis on genre—like producer Timur Bekmambetov using the format as a vehicle for horror (Unfriended) or a thriller (Searching)—yet director Chandler Chavez sees them both as way a to reflect the reality of the post-Covid moment, and a solution to a problem many first time filmmakers have: how do I make a feature with practically no money? American Stream sees Chavez adapting not just the aesthetics and lingo of streaming for the screen, but its rhythms and sense of time. Out of necessity, this gives American Stream an aesthetic grounded in long takes—often cleverly disguising the jumps as being caused by video buffering (with the exception of the ending and a brilliant cooking sequence at the emotional climax, which were captured continuously)—as well as a rich mise-en-scène that displays what’s happening both on camera and in the live text chat in the corner. Through this setup, Chavez tells the story of KillerKyle_77 (Ben Ashby), as he journeys from being an innocuous new streamer to becoming a “lolcow” (inspired, Chavez says, by the “Down the Rabbit Hole” episode on Call of Duty streamer WingsOfRedemption), ruining the relationship with the only person that really cared for him in favor of parasocial acceptance and D-tier fame. Through Chandler’s considered direction, American Stream transcends its formal conceit to become a funny and surprisingly emotional journey to the depths of a streaming community, a familiar corner of the internet that, until recently, has been elusive on the cinema screen—one elderly member of the audience even commented during the Q&A that American Stream was “educational.”.
Fırat Yücel’s short happiness also searches for the reality of life on the internet, but on the side of the “doomscroller” rather than the online personality. Yücel’s film, also set entirely on screens, is from the perspective of an unnamed person (almost certainly influenced by Yücel himself) as their screen time approaches 14 hours a day, caught in insomniac spells while watching the reckless extraction of rare-earth minerals from the Congo by the tech industry and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, the protagonist tries every single easy sleeping aid, from melatonin to 5-HTP supplements, which are recommended by a number of friends and quite popular in the Netherlands. While their late-night Google searches continue, the protagonist finds that the seeds extracted for 5-HTP, Griffonia, is also exploitatively harvested in the Congo—even ways of coping with alienation and malaise under capitalism serve to manufacture that very misery.
It’s a reminder, too, that even in the dislocated world of a movie theater, these seemingly detached dispatches from around the globe are real things, concrete links in the global supply chain. In a real sense, too, film festivals—as much as they are about sitting quietly in a room—are connective nodes, linking local communities to the wider world, bringing a wide array of geopolitical issues into the auditorium. I’m skeptical of the practicality of art as a political tool, but an event like this does spark rich conversations while bringing people together, and more movies playing in Baltimore is always a good thing for the town.
