The 27th Maryland Film Festival brings 140 movies to Baltimore April 8-12. The Beat rounds up eleven favorites, including a horror short about gentrification, a story about stealing cars in Baltimore, an uncomfortable epic about the parasocial ouroboros of streaming, and an animated feature about a queer filmmaker from Morocco living in New York, plus documentaries. (Baynard Woods)
“American Stream”
The all-consuming lust for fame has long powered drama in cinema, but this debut feature from writer/director Chandler Chavez plumbs the most modern iteration of this disease with startling clarity. “American Stream” follows Kyle (Benjamin Ashby), a college dropout in his mid-20s trying to break through as a full-time streamer. Under the handle KillerKyle_77, he struggles to build an audience to watch him play video games and talk about his day-to-day. Kyle’s obsession with earning affiliate status on a Twitch stand-in systematically destroys his relationship with his high school sweetheart, his identity, and his life.
A “screen film” like thrillers “Searching” and “Unfriended,” the entire narrative takes place within a computer desktop, every inch of the display chock-full of expertly observed and brilliantly rendered details about a variety of online subcultures. The parasocial Ouroboros of streamers and audience, content creators and fans, renders plain the distressing moral rot at the core of digital modernity. As funny and cringe as it is discomfiting and distressing, “American Stream” makes for an uncomfortable watch, but a compelling one. I can’t imagine how much more disturbing this will be blown up on the big screen! (Dominic Griffin)
“American Stream” screens Friday, April 10, at 7:15 p.m. and Saturday, April 11, at 2:15 p.m.
“Bouchra”
Ever since the independent film boom in the 1990s, semi-autobiographical, slice-of-life dramas unpacking the filmmaker’s personal traumas and preoccupations have been a festival mainstay. But Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s “Bouchra” is the most inventive and striking slant on that old paradigm in years. The title character, voiced by Bennani, is a queer filmmaker from Morocco living in New York City, working on a movie about her own life and her strained relationship with her mother since she came out nine years ago. Rather than a cheaply produced, prosumer video camera-shot indie, the film is photorealistically rendered in 3D animation, with anthropomorphized characters in place of humans; Bouchra is a canid, her best friend is a lizard, et cetera.
It would be reductive to call it “Zootopia” meets Richard Linklater, but that silly shorthand gets across the strangeness inherent in juxtaposing a visual language often reserved for children’s morality plays designed to sell Funko pops with the emotional texture and cultural specificity this film operates with. It’s also relentlessly meta, asking the viewer to keep track of the multiple layers of reality at play:the storytellers’ real lives, their fictional counterparts, and the deeper fictions those stand-ins produce.
Underneath all that complexity there’s a resonance with the vulnerability inherent to its core dramatic exercise. That it seems to knowingly double as catnip for furries is beside the point, but feels worth noting anyway. (Dominic Griffin)
“Bouchra” screens Friday, April 10, at 11:45 a.m. and Sunday, April 12, at 5:30 p.m.
“Mouse”
Crime doesn’t pay, but it’s sure fun to watch in movies and on television. This unconventional thriller from writer/director Kenny Riches possesses a unique perspective on the intersection of acting outside of the law and, as a result, feeling isolated from the world the law is meant to maintain. Riches stars as Denny, a soft-spoken loner who lives with his Japanese mother in 2007 Salt Lake City. Fundamentally incompatible with every dead-end job he’s ever tried, Denny has been a petty thief since childhood. As we get to know him, his deadpan voice-over narration unpacks and offers “how-to” insight into all the ways he’s quietly used robbery to replace gainful employment.
But when he signs up for a pen pal service advertised in the paper, he crosses paths with a pair of scammers who operate in a different arena of lawbreaking, one that sets him on a collision course with steeper consequences than he’s ever faced. Early on, he tells us the easiest way to avoid doing hard time is to stick to soft crime. His yearning for deeper connection takes him out of his comfort zone and takes this otherwise charming and low-key crime picture careening off the rails in unexpected ways. Riches avails himself well as a storyteller and a performer, instantly making him a talent to watch for the future. “Mouse” at times calls to mind Christopher Nolan’s debut film, “Following,” so perhaps we’ll be hearing a lot more from Riches down the line. (Dominic Griffin)
“Mouse” screens Friday, April 10, at 9:30 p.m. and Sunday, April 12, 5:15 p.m.
“Stealing Cars”
Daddy issues and grand larceny auto theft make for peanut butter and jelly in Marly Hernández Cortés and Stephen Schuyler’s “Stealing Cars,” a beautiful coming-of-age film about all the things we can never truly run from. Carlos Pagán Cruz delivers a star-making turn as Matías, a teenage car thief whose world collapses when he comes home to his mother dead from an aneurysm. Matías is plucked from a youth housing program by Danny, the abusive biological father (the late Max Carpenter in one of his last roles) he and his mother had spent the last decade running from.
Moving from the Norfolk, VA area to Baltimore, Matías tries to find his own way, linking with a new buyer for his boosted rides and even finding young love. But his strained relationship with Danny is too strong a knot to untie. Danny is sober, has found God, and is riddled with guilt by his past actions, but no matter his efforts to manage his anger, his very presence puts Matías on notice. More distressing is seeing how much like his father he’s slowly turning out to be. In Catherine Lacey’s short story “Cut,” there is a poem written by one of the narrator’s students that reads, “if you’re raised with an angry man in your house, / there will always be an angry man in your house. / you will find him even when he is not there.” Watching two angry men navigate being in the same house is a harrowing experience, but it’s not without its attempts at warmth and hope for breaking the cycle. (Dominic Griffin)
“Stealing Cars” screens Friday, April 10, at 2:45 p.m. and Saturday, Apr 11, at 9:15 p.m.
“The Blue Trail”
“The Blue Trail” is set in a theoretical near-future Brazil where preventative social isolation of the elderly is the basis of a new government initiative. The film is centered on one woman who must fight for the last vestiges of her autonomy. Seventy-seven-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg) wakes up in a new world where she is no longer allowed to hold a job, cannot travel without the approval of her adult daughter, and is about to be jettisoned to a special colony for seniors, where they have ample leisure time but no freedom. Facing a new normal that is unlike any period of her life up to this point, she is repeatedly asked what she wants to do with her new free time, but the one thing that comes to mind — flying in a plane for the first time in her life — is not an option.
She goes rogue, giving authorities the slip in an attempt to find someone to help her make this dream of flying a reality. Over the film’s efficient 86-minute runtime, Tereza experiences no shortage of adventures, betting on fish fights, taking hallucinogens from a rare snail, and exploring the lush environs of Brazil through “Neon Bull” director Gabriel Mascaro’s vision of his home country. The film’s darkly comic presentation of all that Tereza endures would be more hilarious if it wasn’t so damned sad — the very act of aging can feel like an endless humiliation ritual perpetuated by the youth. But Weinberg’s central performance is astonishing. The new initiative states that “the future is for everyone,” but Tereza has to claw for her own freedom. It’s a genuine joy watching a woman who has spent all her time on this earth toiling seek out meaning for her life on her own terms. (Dominic Griffin)
“The Blue Trail” screens Sunday, April 12, at 1:45 p.m.
“A Life in Art: Through the eye of Dr. Leslie King Hammond”
If “A Life in Art” — the gorgeous documentary about the indefatigable art historian, curator, and champion of Baltimore’s Black art community Dr. Leslie King-Hammond — does not cause you to fall in love with the city all over again, you might as well pack it up and move your ass on out to Harford County, or wherever it is that miserable people go.
Made by Ben Baker-Lee and Rassaan Hammond (King-Hammond’s son), the feature-length doc is a portrait not only of Hammond but of a community at the heart of Baltimore’s art scene: Joyce J. Scott, Amy Sherald, Jeffrey Kent, Ernest Shaw, Loring Cornish, Willie Birch, Ron Bechet, Sonya Clark, Darryl Montana, Kevin Brown, Raoul Middleman (through his son), and more. Both Kent and Cornish cry as they relate their first meetings with Hammond. Corning, who is known for the mirrored mosaics on his home in Fells Point, said that when he moved to town, no one took him seriously until King-Hammond saw his work, while Kent, with King-Hammond by his side, tearfully relates a studio visit where “she ripped me a new one” — a critique that is, he said, the only reason he is the artist he is today.
We also watch her sitting with Sherald as she paints the famous portrait she did of Michelle Obama, relating the blue background to the blue paint used by enslaved people “as a protective barrier — the master and the mistress would never pass the blue border.” (See our review of “Haint.”)
The wonder, humor, and charm that King-Hammond displays is contagious. When she was a child, she lost one of her eyes and, instead of wallowing in sorrow, she marvelled watching a man blow her glass eye, the old fashioned way. “I was absolutely freaking mesmerized,” she says. And, after that, continued to bug her mother with questions about art and artists.
The film is full of warmth and laughter — though we get hints of the fight it took to get there when she relates how Johns Hopkins did their best to kick her out of its PhD program, flatly proclaiming that there were no African American artists worthy of a dissertation. King-Hammond won that fight. It is beautiful to watch the art community sing an original song to her at a party, with a line about adding the “Dr.” to her name for that PhD she had to fight for, with Joyce Scott, sitting right beside her, hitting a high harmony.
The movie deals with art, community, and aging, but it is ultimately a film about a larger than life woman and her love of artists and their love of her. (Baynard Woods)
“A Life in Art,” presented by Joyce J. Scott, screens on Thursday, April 9, at 7 p.m.
“BMore Mighty”
When DJ and producer Marquis Gasque changed his professional name from Murder Mark to Mighty Mark, there were a lot of brand-conscious blowhards who were certain it would ruin his career. That’s been well over a decade ago now, and Mighty Mark remains one of the top practitioners and ambassadors of Baltimore Club, and Sadeq Alkhoori’s new short documentary shows us why: Mighty Mark is a thoroughly Baltimore guy, equally committed to the city, its music, and its people.
“I think Baltimore and Club is equally important,” he said “Because it comes from community first, so it’s not just about the people who are making the Club. Like you make the Club but then the DJs who are in the club play it, then the dancers dance to it, then you have certain people that are at the party every week and you grow as a community.”
Mighty Mark tells how, when he first started trying to make Club music, he was boosted by legendary 92Q DJs K-Swift and KW Griff, and how he continued to develop his skills.
“It sounds simple,” he says. “But it’s all about that arrangement. You can have the sound but it’s all how you actually put it together.”
That is similar to making a documentary, where you have the footage but the film is all about how you put it together, and director Alkhoori did a great job at putting this film together. Seeing footage of people dancing with wild skill to Mark’s music on the big screen alone is well worth the price of admission.
“BMore Mighty” screens as part of “Music Brings the People Together Shorts” on Friday, April 10, at 3:45 p.m. and Sunday, April 12, at 5:30 p.m.
“TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing”
“Don’t leave the arena to the fools,” Toni Cade Bambara said to poet Nikky Finney. This pressing reminder to continue on with the work of Black literature and organizing is one of the final beats in the film, and its resonance drives home Bambara’s legacy as an educator and elder. “TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing” premiered in 2025 at Blackstar Film Festival, and now Baltimore audiences have a chance to see the award-winning independent documentary. Created by director/editor Monica Henriquez and director/producer Louis Massiah, a longtime collaborator of Bambara, the film is a eulogy for Bambara on screen — not in the maudlin sense, but in the sincerest expression of grievous praise from a chorus of the living to their dearly departed friend.
Audiences at MdFF shouldn’t expect a linear timeline of Bambara’s life or a strict resume of her literary or organizing work. Through conversations with her family, her friends, and her students, we learn Bambara was unique, seriously critical, and fly wherever she went — and oh, how she went! Instead of a neat CV of Bambara’s work as a professor, writer, and filmmaker, the documentary soars over New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and across the Atlantic too, to explore the breadth of Bambara’s relationships. Dates are loose, and the film breezes past any sense of grounding in time, opting instead to root us in Bambara’s intimate relationships. The film is held together by the deeply felt admiration of each person for Bambara’s life, which was characterized by her critical eye and uncanny ability to turn strangers into companions.
By the end, audiences aren’t experts in Bambara’s biography. This is not an obituary offering the beginning, middle, and end of a life neatly between opening and closing credits. This film eulogizes Bambara with a breezy, true intimacy that shows more in the smiles of her surviving kin than most documentaries muster from hours of confessionals. From her brother to her editor and friend Toni Morrison, the featured faces in this documentary aren’t concerned with relaying a truncated obituary of their beloved. The nearly two-hour film offers us a seat on a fenced-in Philadelphia porch where 31 years later we’re still at the lively repast of a literary giant. (Bry Reed)
“TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing” screens Saturday, April 11, at 6:30 p.m.
“Haint”
Ever since 1865 when Sherman’s field order gave the South Carolina Sea Islands to the people who had been enslaved there, white people have been trying to take it back, whether through the outright violence of the Klan and Jim Crow or the slower violence of gentrification, tax sales, and foreclosures. But the Gullah Geechee people of the Sea Islands continue to resist the transformation of the chains and links of their former bondage into the chains and links of restaurants and golf courses. And so, perhaps, do the spirits of that haunted, blood-soaked land.
Writer and director Jahmil Eady brings this dynamic to life in “Haint,” a 17-minute short that opens as Gullah Geechee handywoman Annabelle (Melanie Nicholls-King) loses her blue Sea Island house to tax foreclosure. Then we see her mixing the “haint blue” paint that, when applied to windowsills or doorframes, keeps the legions of evil spirits such as haints and plateyes away.
The white new arrivals — “comyas” as opposed to the Gullah Geechee “binyas” — take no such precautions, and the island has seen a slate of grisly murders, in the face of which Annabelle faces a difficult moral choice.
It’s a very short film, so I won’t give away anything else except to say that a horror film that makes use of some of the spinetingling tales of hags and haints is long overdue. And, while some shorts are complete in themselves, this is one of those that feels like an audition for a feature. And with a supremely scary creature scene, I would love to see this story play out at feature length. (Baynard Woods)
“Haint” screens as part of the festival’s closing night, Sunday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m.
“Don Quixote Against the Evil Forces of Hell”
This 24-minute gem might be the film for which you cheer the loudest at this year’s festival, because the forces of evil against which the errant knight Don Quixote (played by an irascible Marc Ségala) battles are the technological forces that control all our lives, whether we like it or not. It is a French, partially animated version of the novel, updated for the AI era.
When Quixote, riding his old horse Rocinante, wants to go on a new adventure, his old squire Sancho Panza (Tariq Bettahar) is too busy watching television to bother, and so Quixote sets off to kill the TV — but that is only the beginning of his travails.
The film is gorgeous because the wide, spaghetti Western-style vistas of Quixote on his horse are paired with the writer and director Guillaume Rieu’s superb animation, which makes ample use of sculpture and archaic special effects. Rieu either fundamentally misunderstands or disregards much of the intention of the original novel — Quixote is not the one who fights against the enchantments of escapist media, but the one who is most susceptible to them; and Sancho loses all of his wise humor — but even, or especially, as a lover of the novel, I did not give a damn. Enthralment by our own technologies has come a long way since the advent of the novel, and so has Quixote. (Baynard Woods)
“Don Quixote Against the Evil Forces of Hell” is one of the “Unhinged Shorts” that screens Thursday, April 9, at 12 p.m. and Saturday, April 11, at 5:45 p.m.
“Mountain Punk Arts”
Anyone who ever found — or better, created — a haven of other misfits in a small town will be thoroughly charmed by “Mountain Punk Arts,” a 15-minute short about Savage Mountain Punk Arts, an organization promoting Appalachian punk in Frostburg, Maryland. When Gerry LaFemina got a job as an English professor at Frostburg State, there wasn’t much of a punk scene, and so, in the spirit of punk’s DIY ethos, he created one.
The doc, directed and produced by Ethan Romaine, checks in on the scene, telling the story of its origin, growth, and importance to the community. There’s no real drama, or rather the drama is all subtext: how hard it can be to grow up feeling like a freak without a community of like-minded people. But the concert footage of some rocking bands and ecstatic fans and the guileless sincerity of the interviews are full of heart and charm. And it kinda makes me want to take a road trip. (Baynard Woods)
“Mountain Punk Arts” screens as part of “Music Brings the People Together Shorts” on Friday, April 10, at 3:45 p.m. and Sunday, April 12, at 5:30 p.m.
The 27th Maryland Film Festival runs Thursday, April 8, through Sunday, April 12, at The Parkway. The full list of festival films and links to purchase tickets can be found at snfparkway.org/mdff/program.