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IFFBoston's annual spring extravaganza serves 'buffet of films'
“We’re putting this whole thing together with popsicle sticks every year,” laughed Independent Film Festival Boston program director Nancy Campbell, after a technical snafu resulted in tickets for this year’s fest going on sale a day later than originally planned. The good news is that they’re up and running now, with plenty of seats still available for IFFBoston’s 23rd annual spring extravaganza, which runs from Wednesday, April 22, through Wednesday, April 29, at the Somerville Theatre, the Brattle Theatre and the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
Filmed everywhere from Hollywood to Hingham, the 2026 lineup includes 40 features and 11 short film programs, as well as the ninth annual Student Short Showcase, which offers a chance to see the best and brightest offerings from area colleges on the Somerville’s giant screen, as well as a post-screening mixer for local filmmakers to get acquainted.
“Movies create community,” said Campbell. That’s been IFFBoston’s mission from the beginning. New England’s largest film festival attracts around 10,000 attendees annually, catering to local movie buffs as well as festival alums flying in from all over. As someone who’s been going to IFFBoston for more than two decades, I can’t tell you how many dear friendships started while standing in line at the Somerville, or chatting about movies at an afterparty. It’s a perfect place for folks to come together, share enthusiasms and make discoveries. That’s why Campbell programs films from such a wide variety of genres, a selection of pictures which often have nothing in common except that they’re well worth your time. She calls it, “a big buffet of stuff for people to sample. We want them to expand their boundaries.”
“People make their own festival,” added executive director Brian Tamm. “We want enough stuff for them to be able to find their way in.” He said he hopes that folks coming for crowd-pleasers like Paul Rudd’s wedding singer comedy “Power Ballad” (Monday, April 27 at the Somerville) might consider sticking around for more challenging fare like “Filipiaña” (Monday, April 27 at the Brattle) or “Blue Heron” (Sunday, April 26 at the Brattle), films from other countries that play around with unconventional narrative techniques. That’s why IFFBoston is offering everything from “Nuns vs. The Vatican" (Saturday, April 25 at the Somerville), a documentary about a group of sisters banding together to expose yet another shocking cover-up of clergy abuses, to “The Big Cheese” (Sunday, April 26 at the Somerville) which follows a ragtag group of Americans trying to compete in France’s Mondial du Fromage – basically the Olympics of cheese.
This year’s festivities kick off with artist and activist Boots Riley’s “I Love Boosters” (Wednesday, April 22 at the Somerville). The latest provocation from the hip-hop polymath stars Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige as a trio of professional shoplifters trying to take down a fashionista played by Demi Moore. But if you remember the writer-director’s audacious 2018 debut “Sorry to Bother You,” you’ve probably already guessed that this satire of global capitalism is a lot more involved and insane than can be conveyed in a simple synopsis. Riley himself is scheduled to attend the opening night screening, which will be followed by a party upstairs at the Crystal Ballroom. You should wear a big, fun hat — like Boots.
Things wrap up a week later with special guest Olivia Wilde presenting a 35mm screening of her new comedy “The Invite” (Wednesday, April 29 at the Coolidge). Getting back to basics after the bizarre tabloid sideshow of her big studio sophomore effort “Don’t Worry Darling,” the filmmaker co-stars with Seth Rogen in the story of an uptight married couple knocked for a loop by an invitation from their free-spirited neighbors, played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz. Based on a 2020 Spanish film called “The People Upstairs,” the script is by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, who previously penned the 2012 Sundance favorite “Celeste and Jesse Forever.”
You can also see Wilde onscreen earlier in the festival, giving a fearlessly funny performance as the hot boss from hell in longtime troublemaker Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex” (Friday, April 24 at the Brattle). The button-pushing director of Gen X landmarks like “The Doom Generation” has a grand old time tweaking Gen Z prudishness in this “Sunset Boulevard” riff about a hapless arts major just out of college – perfectly played by a wide-eyed Cooper Hoffman – who becomes an assistant and sex slave to Wilde’s tyrannical erotic artist. Co-starring Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho and Charli xcx, it’s like “The Devil Wears Prada” but with dildos and ball gags.
Documentary legend Ross McElwee pioneered a form of first-person cinema with his slyly hilarious 1986 masterpiece “Sherman’s March,” in which the director’s explorations of the American South were interrupted by his bumbling attempts to find a girlfriend. Fans of McElwee’s subsequent films feel like we’ve gotten to know the filmmaker and his family over the years, most heartbreakingly his son Adrian, who struggled with addiction and died of a fentanyl overdose in 2016. McElwee will be at IFFBoston in this year’s Documentary Spotlight with his latest film, “Remake” (Saturday, April 25 at the Somerville), in which the director reflects on his son’s life while a Hollywood studio tries to produce a fictionalized version of “Sherman’s March.” Art and memory swirl together in this meditation on the difference between documenting an experience and living it.
Given my profession, I couldn’t help but love “The Last Critic” (Saturday, April 25 at the Somerville), a portrait of former Village Voice music editor Robert Christgau. The self-appointed Dean of American Rock Critics has reviewed more than 17,000 albums over his 60+ year career, and the doc delves into his working methods, as well as his then-controversial championing of rap and The Ramones. Christgau’s terse, unsparing reviews prompted Lou Reed to call him “a toef---er” on a live album, and some of the doc’s funniest moments find artists like Thurston Moore and festival guest Boots Riley reading aloud his not always generous assessments of their work. Still, the film has a rare respect for criticism and a life spent “helping people hear music.” I’m told the 83-year-old Dean himself will be at the screening, if you want to take issue with what he said about prog rock.
Local film critic and music scene veteran Tim Jackson would have been at IFFBoston anyway as a spectator, but he’s here as a director this year with “Marblehead Morning: 50 Years in Harmony” (Sunday, April 26 at the Somerville), a profile of New England folk duo Mason Daring and Jeanie Stahl, who have been performing together for half a century. The screening is followed later that afternoon by Robert Gordon and Joe Lauro’s “Newport & the Great Folk Dream” (Sunday, April 26 at the Somerville), a look at the Rhode Island music festival during its formative years from 1963 through 1966, featuring rare and previously unseen footage of Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez and some kid named Bob.
Keeping it in the neighborhood, Somerville filmmaker Spike Kittrell’s “All My Friends” (Friday, April 24 at the Somerville) is having its hometown premiere. The largely improvised drama was shot in Boston over the course of two years, following two college pals navigating post-graduation malaise before going their separate ways. “Moving from Allston to Somerville is part of getting older,” quipped Campbell. “You trade the rats for raccoons and wild turkeys.”
Other area filmmakers in this year’s lineup include Jeremy Workman, whose “Secret Mall Apartment” won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at IFFBoston in 2024, before a blockbuster run at the Somerville Theatre last summer. Workman returns this year with “School for Defectors” (Saturday, April 25 at the Brattle), about a class of children in Busan whose parents bravely escaped from North Korea. Local documentarian Bestor Cram is bringing “Tiananmen Tonight” (Monday, April 27 at the Somerville), which chronicles Dan Rather and the CBS Evening News team’s heroic efforts to tell the world about the 1989 student uprising in Beijing, back when CBS News actually stood for something.
Pourya Azarbayjani Dow’s “As I Am” (Saturday, April 25 at the Somerville) follows a 60-year-old Iranian man who comes to Hingham to reunite with an old friend he hasn’t seen in four decades. Campbell loves the cross-cultural fusion of “seeing an Iranian-style film set in a Massachusetts coastal town.” And since we’re in a city with more than a few universities, Tamm hopes local viewers will pay special attention to “First They Came for My College” (Thursday, April 23 at the Somerville), which details Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political coup at the New College of Florida, the first test case in the right wing’s recent war on higher education. “It’s a good thing Brian wasn’t watching this with an audience,” Campbell confided. “There was a lot of yelling in the house.”
This reviewer was quite taken with “Late Fame” (Tuesday, April 28 at the Brattle), the second dramatic feature from former New York Film Festival director Kent Jones, whose woefully underseen “Diane” was one of the best movies of 2019. Willem Dafoe gives a tender, soulful performance as a New York City postal worker befriended by a clique of wealthy young literary enthusiasts who revere an obscure book of poems he wrote nearly 50 years ago. Adapted by “May December” screenwriter Samy Burch from an Arthur Schnitzler novella, this wistful and dryly funny movie is about abandoned dreams, the quest for authenticity and what happens to culture in a city where only rich kids can afford a life in the arts.
A similar concern runs through local filmmaker Anne Continelli’s “A Matter of Light,” which screens in the Shorts Hereford package (Sunday, April 26 and Monday, April 27 at the Somerville). Ostensibly the story of how a group of female artists in 1974 converted the old Rogers Foam warehouse into Somerville’s Vernon Street Studios, it’s also a cautionary tale of community and gentrification. The film is about how precious these shared spaces are, and the hard work that goes into keeping them. It’s also a reminder of why we should cherish events like IFFBoston while we’re still lucky enough to have them.
Independent Film Festival Boston runs from Wednesday, April 22, through Wednesday, April 29.
