New/Next Film Festival 2025

Over the last three years, the New/Next Film Festival in Baltimore has become one of the few essential American showcases for independent moviemaking. Everything about the festival, from the connoisseurship of its programming to the way it brings together filmmaking communities locally, nationally, and internationally, has been carefully crafted, with remarkable results. By independent filmmaking, however, I do not mean Indiewood productions from sexy boutique production companies that manage to turn a nice profit, but rather a host of microbudget, DIY films made in the spirit of Baltimore’s native son John Waters and his orbit of like-minded “Dreamlanders. ” In fact, housing the festival each year is the Charles Theatre, where Polyester premiered in 1981. The bones of the Beaux Arts–styled building are more than one hundred years old, sitting on a site that first housed facilities for cable cars, later turning into whatever Baltimore needed through the years, including a barn for buses, a library for the blind, and, later, a ballroom. A film theater by a different name first popped up on the site in 1939, the all-newsreel Times Theatre. In 1959, the building was renamed after its location on Charles Street, with several renovations to follow as the theater became a hub for revival, art-house, and independent cinema, going from one screen to five. Today, the theater boasts 1, 150 seats. 1The programming of the festival is remarkably wide-ranging. Various strands of independent filmmaking come together: art-house cinema, avant-garde and experimental films, documentary features and shorts, video essays and essay films, underground films in the midnight-movie tradition, mumblecore features, performance-art adaptations, works by directors bound for Indiewood, and more. Yet, despite this variety, to be at the festival is to feel very much in the presence of a scene—linked sets of creative collaborators, most apparently millennials and Gen Z, who crop up in these movies again and again, as directors, writers, actors, editors, and crew members, all the way down the line. End credits and acknowledgment sections inevitably blend together. Many of these films and their creators have also been on tour together for months, if not years, playing at festivals including the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, the Downtown Festival at the Roxy Cinema in Lower Manhattan, the Slamdance Festival (formerly of Park City, now of Los Angeles), and larger, more-commercial festivals, like SXSW and Tribeca. Ringing around my head during the festival was a phrase from a 1989 essay by Tom Gunning on the then-contemporary avant-garde: “Something is happening around here. ”2A millennial generational sensibility runs through many of the fiction films at New/Next: postironic humor, coupled with moments of intense sincerity; an appreciation for—and innovative use of—video aesthetics, without dipping into cheap nostalgia; and the infusion of Internet cultures and subcultures, ranging from memes and online bits to general anxiety about living in an age dominated by the World Wide Web. Yet for many of these films, it would be too easy and too limiting to say they function as “critiques” of modern life. Some certainly do. It is inconceivable, for instance, that one would view Brandon Daley’s POSITIONS (2025) as anything less. The film borrows the energy and despair of Uncut Gems (2019), centering on a poor man whose gambling addiction manifests itself in junk crypto currencies. With his horrible trading instincts, the swings of the market tear down just about every relationship in his life. But these films also contain a deep appreciation, even an outright love, for the capricious technologies of our time, the absurd chaos and joy they have wrought. And these technologies are often used to invite us to see anew. Still rattling around my head is a line from Reveries: The Mind Prison (Graham Mason, 2025), which features Anthony Oberbeck and Matt Barats as two “drifters” moving through the desert. The film is an adaptation of their live performance art, which features the sunglassed pair imparting wisdom via monologues: sometimes they are silly; at others, deeply profound. Often, they manage to be both. Think about all your blinks, they say in the film. That time is made up of moments from your life that you have missed. When you die, the first thing you will do in heaven is watch a compilation of all the blinks, giving you the chance to truly see your life in full. The notion sounds like an amateur iMovie montage, the kind that featured images from a vacation set to upbeat music (I’m thinking, “Pictures of You”) and would widely be considered cringeworthy. But today that generational sensibility (and its online term cringe) has been reclaimed, recast as a vehicle for surprising sincerity, a mechanism through which to reflect on the speed of daily life. The line hit hard at the Charles. The most useful term for understanding the kinds of work playing at New/Next might be Scott MacDonald’s formulation critical cinema. In essence, this concept refers to films that exist parallel to dominant, mainstream commercial moviemaking, and thus are directly and indirectly in dialogue with the multiplex and television. It’s an umbrella term MacDonald employs to draw together various strands of independent, experimental, avant-garde, and underground filmmaking. Such works, MacDonald writes, “place our awareness and acceptance of the commercial forms and their highly conventionalized modes of representation into crisis. ”3 Critical cinema works can be formally experimental avant-garde films, but they can also be more overtly essayistic in their treatment of commercial images, or they can take the form of midnight movies like those of Waters (to whom MacDonald spoke for the first volume of his A Critical Cinema interview collections). Such films need not proclaim opposition to commercial flicks, in other words. Critical cinema invites us to consider our relationship generally to the moving image, how the sounds and images we experience shape and inform our lives, for better and for worse. This has made critical cinema a useful concept for avoiding the mistake of putting up too high a wall between noncommercial and commercial forms. Equally, critical cinema can have commercial success (cf. Waters) and mainstream movies can contain critical elements. Inevitably, these modes of moviemaking exist in conversation. This is all by way of naming another connection between many of the films at New/Next: a genuine love and appreciation for mainstream movies and their centrality to the festival audiences’ lives. This sensibility, although not stated directly, seems deeply embedded in the spirit of the festival and the movies that screen over its four-day run. The most obvious example this year was the choice of the festival’s one twentieth-century repertory screening: Mark L. Lester’s Commando (1985), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and introduced at New/Next by comedian Stavros Halkias, costar of Netflix’s Tires (2024–) and a Baltimore native. But this larger ethos manifests itself in the festival’s selection of newer films too. Take, for example, the moment in Sabrina Greco’s Lockjaw (2025), in which the protagonist, Rayna (Blu Hunt), whose jaw is wired shut after an accident, is mocked for her inability to fully and clearly speak. Her magician antagonist, Robert (Nick Corirossi), takes the ribbing to another level, lifting his phone to reveal an image of Bane, the Batman villain played by Tom Hardy in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012), who speaks through a gas mask designed to administer pain relief, and who has become a beloved camp figure, especially in online meme culture. All the characters join in to mock Rayna by doing their best Bane impersonation: “I was born in the shadows!” Few moments from the festival elicited such a full-bellied, loving laugh from the audience, some of whom were perhaps tempered by realizing their complicity in such cruel teasing. More generally, Hollywood allusions become sites of collective memory, which can be deployed with positive intentions, including, as is the case here and with many films throughout the program, nonmalicious trolling. On the whole, the festival does not exclude films that have already played or will soon play bigger screens. The ambitions of the filmmakers similarly vary. The first film I experienced was Tsai Ming-liang’s virtuosic Abiding Nowhere, the tenth in his “Walker” series featuring his muse, Lee Kang-Sheng, and set in nearby Washington, DC. It played at the Berlin Film Festival in 2024, but this was its Maryland premiere—a fact that speaks to the disjointed state of film distribution and the increasing sense among audiences that film release dates are less important than they were in the past. That the festival manages to keep one foot planted in the world of avant-garde filmmaking and another in the realm of more-commercial indie movies is a credit to the diverse tastes of New/Next’s programmer, Eric Allen Hatch. Before cofounding the festival in 2023 with producer Sam Sessa, Hatch was a programmer at the Maryland Film Festival from the mid-2000s to the early 2010, the period Filmmaker Magazine described as its “heyday. ”4 While there, Hatch programmed screenings by that generation’s rising talent, including Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), starring Greta Gerwig. For many newer filmmakers, New/Next will be a welcome stop on similar filmmaking journeys. Equally important to the festival’s sense of community is its commitment to Maryland artists. Among the most popular—and fastest-selling—events at the festival each year are the programs specifically advertising their local roots. This includes filmmakers living in the state and filmmakers born and raised there who have taken their camera elsewhere. One of the most exciting programs of the festival for me was “MD Doc Voices, ” an eclectic mix of topics and formal approaches to nonfiction. It included May Santiago’s deeply haunting and moving found-footage film Agencia (2025), which draws on essay-film and video-essay traditions. Bringing together archival, scholarly, and artistic practice, Santiago’s work begins with twentieth-century government films made in and about Puerto Rico, eventually moving away from the original footage to increasingly weave in footage of the filmmaker’s own life and family, painting an alternative, often unseen history of resilience. This program also included one of the most beautiful and striking films I encountered at the festival: Irene Zahariadis and Kevin Walker’s twenty-six-minute Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (2025). Set on the small Greek island of Nisyros, the docufiction film dramatizes an everyday process on the island: exhuming bodies to make room for future burials in the limited earth. In the film, the population is reduced to a handful of elderly villagers, who must take on the weight of this task. Intercut with the removal of human remains are staged scenes, interviews, and reenactments that capture life in this beautiful and remote place. So immaculate was the staging and composition, so dramatic and devastating the context, and so beautiful the empty city, it all felt like the trappings of a dream. Zahariadis and Walker masterfully exploit this tension and use it to further complicate our sense of what is real to give way to a greater truth about the persons and place they depict. Most feature presentations also screened with an accompanying short film. One of the more compelling pairings was the aforementioned POSITIONS with Brittany Ashley’s short Take Care (2025). The twelve-minute movie centers on Leah (Courtney Pauroso), a young woman who has injured herself at some unspecified time in the past, and has become so smitten with the emergency-room nurse who treated her, Nelly (Stephanie Courtney, who plays Flo in a range of Progressive Insurance advertisements), that she keeps purposefully injuring herself in order to return to the hospital. This time, she takes a knife to her hand, Googling how to do it so that she (a) does not critically injure herself and (b) injures herself enough to require an overnight visit. Though she manages to get her one-on-one time with Nelly, her injury, as it turns out, does not merit a stay. Panic begins to play out across Leah’s horrified face as she realizes the awful truth: she will have to return home, alone for yet another night. The desperation Leah feels recalls that of Mike (Michael Kunicki), the central character in POSITIONS. Stuck in a low-paying warehouse job and responsible for caring for his dying father, Mike is addicted to trading high-stakes cryptocurrencies. Any time he gets his hands on a bit of money, he fires it into a digital exchange and watches as the assets rise and—inevitably—fall. Except for his brother, Vinny (Vinny Kress), Mike is mostly alone when these trades go south. One gets the sense that these high-risk ventures are less about the money and more about searching for the validation that money brings from others (and elicits in oneself). In both Leah and Mike, we see the kind of loneliness that has come to define this anxious decade. Digital remedies are fruitless in treating that distinctly millennial mania: grappling with early adulthood in a digital world that intensifies mental anguish and brings our tolerance for risk to a point of no return. The festival’s most memorable night, for me, featured In the Glow of Darkness (Tucker Bennett, 2025). It is a film that takes place “15 minutes into the future and 10 years in the past, ” as the festival program declared. Set in San Zokyo, “a 1080p metropolis running at 30 frames per second, ” it concerns a young computer hacker, Logan (Lucas Bennett), who decides to take a stand against the company pushing out “Meme, ” a psychedelic drug delivered by scanning one’s personal QR code affixed to the body. Not only does the drug feel great, but it also delivers targeted ads. The eighty-minute feature unfolds so much more, from the hilarious and cunning Detective Dick Sims on the case, played by the actor Groovin, to a techno–fight scene with a down-on-his-luck fighter in the spirit of Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976). The film played at 10 p. m. on Saturday to a packed house that relished the beautiful absurdity of a film that seemed to tap into our collective, Internet-fueled psyches. My own experience with the film came on the heels of spending months with the work and personal archive of George Kuchar, the colossus of the underground moviemaking tradition. Kuchar began as a darling of 1960s underground circles in New York, where the work he made with his twin brother, Mike, was championed by Jonas Mekas in the pages of The Village Voice. From there, in the 1970s, he moved west to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute, where his filmmaking classes, in each of which his students and he would make a low-budget movie, became the stuff of legends, as documented in Jennifer Kroot’s 2009 documentary It Came from Kuchar. In the 1980s, he was a prolific and early adopter of video, often turning the camera on himself and becoming, as Barbara London called him, “the unassuming elder statesman of the first-person narrative. ”5As I watched In the Glow of Darkness, the spirit of Kuchar’s approach to moviemaking was profoundly present: nonprofessional actors turning out equally compelling and hilarious performances, the centrality of over-the-top costumes, and the embrace of each respective era’s form of cheap filming, which for Kuchar was the video camera and today is the smart phone. One of the best scenes in In the Glow of Darkness features a chase through a mall captured by pressing two iPhones together (held by one of the film’s cinematographers, Neal Wynne, director of The Trick, which played at last year’s festival) and running in between the two actors. The effect is astonishing, a showcase of innovative, DIY filmmaking and why one does not need an expensive camera to do something truly great. Such is the Kucharian tradition. Yet, as I watched the film, with Kuchar and his twin brother and frequent collaborator, Mike, racing through my mind, I began to check is a in and to see that are not there, and to have play a I as of I been a for a time in which I not the of underground movies and the of a Kuchar the kinds of films that John Waters to New to see Kuchar me the to in my own Waters later in the to the Kuchar from a “I to renamed a and made my first real I living in New and in a film that for me so clearly the of the the screen seemed to be the to that an but a and of their and sensibility for our online the credits in the were and Mike I with Bennett, who that he and his collaborators, including who and the film, were students of at the San Francisco Art one need not this fact to the of their film or to the underground it so and keeps But to this fact, to it in the and to see it play out so clearly at the festival is but another of New/Next’s own the way the festival both showcases of scene and recalls the and of moviemaking by Such is the energy that is the independent cinema.