The 30th Annual New Jersey International Film Festival

Schedule:

Online for 24 Hours and In-Person at 5:00 p.m.

Short Documentary Program:

Marine Field Station - Thomas Lennon (New Brunswick, New Jersey)
Nestled in New Jersey ‘s coastal marshes, a fabled research center has quietly tracked the marine life nearby. Now with water levels rising around them, these scientists face a new and unnerving subject to study: themselves. 2025; 10 min.

Birdfeeder - Daniel Feighery (Brooklyn, New York)
Birdfeeder is not just a documentary about birds; it's a visual and emotional exploration of the human connection to the urban wild, the challenges faced in the time of hardship, and the profound impact of the natural world on the human soul. 2024; 12 min.

Harlem to Harvard - Zuzelin Martin (North Bergen, New Jersey)
An inspirational short documentary about a teacher, Edouard E. Plummer, who helped over 600 students from Harlem attend the most elite boarding schools in the country creating countless ripples of generational impact. 2025; 15 min.

Kanenon:we - Original Seeds - Katsitsionni Fox (Akwesasne Mohawk Nation Territory, New York)
Kanenon:we - Original Seeds carries viewers into the grassroots Indigenous seed sovereignty movement led by Haudenosaunee women. Prior to European contact there was a rich and vibrant diversity of foods, with women primarily responsible for caretaking of the seeds. Genocidal practices including, boarding schools, land theft, forced relocation, imposed religion and even food warfare contributed to a disconnection from our traditional foods and seeds. Indigenous seed keepers are vigilantly protecting the biodiversity of seeds under threat of Agro-Chemical Giants that currently control over sixty percent of seeds worldwide. As these Haudenosaunee women step back into their sacred responsibility as seed keepers they offer a powerful view of what is possible in Indigenous communities working towards food sovereignty. 2024; 27 min.

Our Borderlands - Viktor Witkowski (Hanover, New Hampshire)
The director's 92-year old grandmother Janina lives with her daughter Dana in a village in Poland close to the German border. Both women embody the shared Polish-German history of the region and the violent traumas it carries. Bringing attention to people who live in rural areas and who tend to be either romanticized or stigmatized, this short film is a meditation on place and landscape, history, personal choices and loss, and all those moments between laughter, grief, and wonder. In Polish, subtitled. 2024; 28 min.

Online for 24 Hours and In-Person at 7:00 p.m.

Freeing Juanita - Sebastian Lasaosa Rogers (Brooklyn, New York)
Juanita has been unjustly detained in Reynosa, Mexico for over seven years, accused of a crime she didn’t commit and forced to confess in a language she didn’t understand. This intimate portrait follows Ana and Pedro, Juanita’s aunt and uncle, on their thousand-mile journey from the highlands of Guatemala. With the help of their Maya Chuj community and a network of Maya interpreters, they fight for Juanita’s freedom and demand justice from the Mexican authorities, a cause that became internationally recognized for its defense of migrants’ rights and language justice. In Spanish, subtitled. 2024; 75 min.

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