Margaret Mead Film Festival 2026

Facing the death of his country's glaciers and the loss of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away — family, memory, time, and water. How do you say goodbye to what you never thought you could lose? That's the question Magnason grapples with in Sara Dosa's ambitious new project following her 2022 Sundance Film Festival breakout Fire of Love. Tasked to write the eulogy for Okjökull, the first glacier to be declared dead due to climate change, Magnason reflects on how glaciers create an archive of deep time within their ice over millions of years. Likening this idea of the depth of time to intergenerational memory, he sets out to pass along the stories of his grandparents for future generations, before they too vanish. Drawing from an evocative mix of photographs, home movies, myths, songs, and folk tales, Time and Water is at once an elegy for what we've lost and an attempt at cinematic time travel to retain it.

The Indigenous Bunong practice agriculture by hand and end up in conflict with Cambodia's lucrative trade in CO2 certificates, losing the forest of whose ownership they have no conception. Now and then, split screen. A visual firework display.

Boys in Downeast Maine are shaped by the brutal winters, their harvesting of the ocean's bounty and the rigid codes of their fathers. explores growing up in a community where a man's worth is often defined by the strength of his back.

Young women imagine themselves as a river: what starts off as a poetic metaphor is linked to images of landscape and becomes a many-voiced narration, radically morphing into a political statement. The Kazakh woman, she prefers life without man.

In the remote Liangshan Mountains, 14-year-old Qihuo and her friends set out to find a skirt for her rite of passage. What begins as a small quest drifts into a suspended space of childhood, where time slows and the world is vast.

From the flickering screens of Hollywood horror, to the haunted cane fields of colonial Haiti, "Black Zombie" unearths the buried origins of the zombie, reclaiming it as a symbol of survival and spiritual resistance.

A decade-long global journey chronicles the ever-changing record holders of the title of oldest person alive. What begins as a portrait of longevity becomes a meditation on the passage of time, the randomness of fate, and the joy and profound human experience of being alive. The oldest human being on the planet is not someone you encounter suddenly, nor someone you know for long. As the years go by, and Sam Green meets the next, and the next, oldest person in the world, his personal fascination with what the title means becomes entangled with his own experience of time, and the joys and pains of his own life. Green's work has been a cornerstone of documentary filmmaking for a generation of artists. With one of his most intimate films yet, he returns to the Sundance Film Festival with his unique mixture of wry wit, earnest feeling, and formal play. In The Oldest Person in the World, the profound and silly experience of being alive is articulated in a way only film can do.

Daughters of the Forest is a story of entanglements: between humans and mushrooms; the visible and the invisible; generational knowledge and modern science. This sci-fi documentary invites us to reconsider the experiences of both human and non-human inhabitants of our world. We follow Lis and Juli, two young scientists from indigenous communities that have long lived in symbiosis with the many mushrooms in their regions. The world they know is changing, and their pursuits are threatened by deforestation, lack of opportunity, and loss. Still, they share how mushrooms show us different possibilities of coexistence, helping them overcome obstacles to reshape their lives and futures.

A journey to Michoacán's hypermasculine rodeos descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing, leading to a reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.

Churchill, Manitoba, is famous as an international destination for photographing polar bears. We've seen the majestic images and classic wildlife series captured here - but what do these bears see of us? Through a shift in perspective 'Nuisance Bear' reveals an obstacle course of tourist paparazzi and wildlife officers whom bears must navigate during their annual migration.