Feminist Border Arts Film Festival

Held annually 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, video art, and animation. The festival showcases student 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.

Our festival entails film screenings at the campus digital theater and a video art exhibition at the University Art Gallery. This year the festival seeks to expand its offerings by inviting a small number of filmmakers to speak on panels about their films and to discuss methods to make inclusive/revolutionary storytelling a reality. As films are selected, various filmmakers will be contacted about attending. Due to limited resources, our ability to invite and support travel/lodging for filmmakers is restricted to a small number.

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 sponsor the event in collaboration with the Creative Media Institute and the University Art Gallery.

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.*