Feminist Border Arts Film Festival

Held annually in April on the campus of New Mexico State University, the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival celebrates the power of cinema as a creative tool to reflect upon urgent social issues and thought-provoking representations of identity and difference. The festival emphasizes artistic vision in telling these stories through short film (15 min. and under), including live-action narrative, documentary, essay film, and animation. It showcases student, independent, and professional filmmakers, domestic and international.

The festival seeks shorts that explore topics connected to gender, gender identity, sexuality, race, indigeneity, class, dis/ability, transnationality and diaspora, migration, refugees and displaced persons, activisms, the environment, food/water insecurity, and other social justice perspectives and experiences.

#FBAFF is a growing festival; we are expanding each year. But, #FBAFF is not an industry event. It not a festival for networking. #FBAFF occurs annually through outreach work, collaboration, and a passion for film. #FBAFF is a festival dedicated to filmgoers and makers, students, community members, activists, and scholars who believe in the power of art & the importance of cinema to transform lives and cultural landscapes. As Jeff Chang writes: “Political transformation must be accompanied not just by spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk but by an explosion of mass creativity.” Each year's program is carefully curated with selected films organized according to a narrative structure that allows them to speak to each other/play off one another and develop overarching themes for each year's festival. There is no fee to enter and all events are free and open to the public

Located in New Mexico— a state that includes nineteen sovereign Pueblo nations and is situated less than 50 miles from the U.S./Mexico border— the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival is committed to thinking about margins and liminal experience. The festival defines “feminist border arts” as a practice that challenges the limits of conventional representation through telling stories from the edge; threshold visions from the margins that create new ways of seeing, that visualize underrepresented ways of knowing. Selected films revive the promise of cinema, the possibility of film.

Gender & Sexuality Studies/Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at New Mexico State University sponsors the festival. The Creative Media Institute and the University Art Gallery at NMSU additionally support the festival with facility resources.

Gender & Sexuality Studies at NMSU offers a major, minor, and graduate minor. Students can complete requirements for the major online or in face-to-face courses. See gender.nmsu.edu for further details.

*Cover Image by Laura Anh Williams. Logo by Cassandra Dixon.*