Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Family Friendly, Michigan Premiere, World Premiere, Representative in Attendance
Kendsie and Matt have been living car-free forever, and now they’ve added two kids to the mix without losing any of their optimism. The filmmaker knew she had to capture the joy it’s brought her family and so many others along the way.
Michigan Premiere
This short documentary tells the story of sandhill cranes in America.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Has Subtitles, Family Friendly, Representative in Attendance
Patrick Concannon reflects on his ancestral land near North Lake Leelanau, where hunting, gathering and caring for the land connect family across generations. This film is part of the Leelanau Conservancy’s Indigenous Knowledges Project, dedicated to elevating Anishinaabe voices.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Family Friendly, Michigan Premiere, World Premiere, Student Filmmaker
The filmmakers mother, Jennifer Johnson a fish biologist with the Michigan DNR, discusses her connection with ice fishing.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Staff Pick
The bank swallow looks unremarkable, but it lives in a sensory world so different from our own that it might as well be another universe. Filmed with sweeping beauty and intimate detail, the film follows the colony through a season of triumph and loss.
Filmmaker in Attendance, World Premiere, Staff Pick
Carving a Legacy follows Luke Costilow, an award-winning duck decoy carver and wildlife conservationist, and the often-overlooked role of hunters as stewards of the environment.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly
Scattered around the shores of the Great Lakes are unique ridge and swale ecosystems, created over thousands of years and home to many rare species. Researcher Steve Loheide wants to know what’s happening beneath these landscapes - how shifting Great Lakes water levels ripple underground, and what that could mean for this fragile ecosystem’s future.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Family Friendly, Michigan Premiere
Dragon Mom follows Laura, a mother learning to navigate the emotional, physical, and societal complexities of raising a child who lives with severe disability. Alongside her family, Laura must confront the realities of ableism, advocate for accessibility, and redefine what strength and connection look like.
Michigan Premiere, Representative in Attendance
Two iconic Lake Superior estuaries are among the planet’s most biologically productive environments. The pristine Bad River Sloughs have been sustained through time by the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The much maligned St. Louis River estuary is the heart of the Fond du Lac Band’s traditional homeland. Both face an uncertain future.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly
The Midwest has a rich natural heritage of beautiful forests, sprawling prairies and clear and clean lakes and rivers. While the human footprint across America’s heartland clashes with nature, protection and restoration of our most sensitive habitats is how humans can find a way to help biodiversity persist within our working landscapes.
Family Friendly, First Time Filmmaker, Student Filmmaker
This short documentary builds on the Fish for the Future project put together by the Wisconsin Sierra Club to explore why the Great Lakes are critical and how to preserve them for future generations. The independent filmmaker was a seventh-grade student at the time.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Has Subtitles, Staff Pick
When her best “pow day” friend is diagnosed with breast cancer at a young age, Stephanie turns her grief into purpose. Set deep in the Colorado Rockies, Forever in the Mountains tells the powerful origin story of the nonprofit Tits Deep for Breast Cancer. Join Stephanie as she navigates grief, finds sisterhood, and works to save young lives in the mountains.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly
A group of high school students at a boarding school in Northern Michigan set out to make a film about regenerative farming, only to get tangled in the contradictions between what they learn and the system that feeds them.
Filmmaker in Attendance
A music video for the song ‘If I Go’ which touches on themes of life, death, rebirth, mental health and mother nature. Featuring various beautiful, natural U.P. locations such as The Huron Islands, Montreal Falls, Point Abbaye, and Manitou Island.
Michigan Premiere, Adult Language, Family Friendly
For over a decade, artist Pete Mauney has been ritualistically trekking into the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, all alone. The desolate darkness brings him into confrontation with everything he can’t control. But when the landscape slowly starts to shimmer and sparkle, the magic begins.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Family Friendly, Work in Progress
Michipicoten Island in Lake Superior is the little known sibling to famous Isle Royale. Soak in the rugged wilderness. Explore seldom seen relics and natural wonders. Get to know your seasoned off-trail guides, Michael Neiger and Chris Ozminski. This is a special sneak preview of the nearly completed film.
Family Friendly
Inspired by the seasons and elements of the Upper Peninsula, Joseph Graci carves fine art that is textural, unique, and sense-awakening. This short film follows him as he works on his art in his studio and spends time in the expansive outdoors that inspires it.
Staff Pick, Family Friendly, Michigan Premiere
Listen is a sensory immersion that dissolves the boundaries between us and the more-than-human world. It follows Alaskan author Hank Lentfer as he records forgotten sounds of the natural world and cares for his mother with dementia.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Adult Language
Mall Video Store is a fun and nostalgic short documentary about Harrison Lange, owner of Static Tape Video, an independent video store located inside a Michigan shopping mall. Passionate about movies and physical media, Harrison spends his days rescuing VHS tapes, tracking down forgotten collections, and creating a place where movie lovers can connect through a shared love of film.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Michigan Premiere, First Time Filmmaker, Nudity, Staff Pick
Part nature documentary, part queer love letter to community and action, Neon Reef immerses you in the sun-drenched, surreal beauty of Miami’s underwater world. Dive past the waves that break on the pulsing neon shores of America’s glitziest beach town with this unlikely reef warrior couple as they dive, strategize, schmooze politicians, and rally a diverse community to defend the coral reef at their doorstep.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly, Representative in Attendance, Student Filmmaker
_Organic Network _features interviews from urban farmers and experts in Flint, Michigan on the impact of the water crisis, COVID, benefits of local farming, and how the lives of the farmers have changed over the years.
Has Subtitles, Family Friendly, Michigan Premiere, Staff Pick
Plant Life captures Dr. Joanne Chory at a pivotal moment: as her Parkinson’s advances and carbon levels surge, she pursues her most audacious experiment yet. Having revolutionized plant biology once already, she and her team are re-engineering crops to draw down carbon dioxide at planetary scale — a scientific race against time that may determine both her legacy and our future.
Filmmaker in Attendance
It’s theater of the mind! It’s cinema for the ear! It’s a Points North listening party! This immersive audio experience will transport you through time and space via two never heard before episodes of the award winning podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. Discussion with Points North producers Ellie Katz and Dan Wanschura will follow.
Adult Language
The city of Detroit is 138 square miles. You may know Midtown or Downtown, but Rabinski has been all around. Follow Dan as he traverses the back roads, alleys, and dense wilderness of the Detroit you’ve never seen. Armed with only his bicycle and a camera, Rabinski takes you on a journey that even the locals have a hard time finding.
Filmmaker in Attendance
In the aftermath of a devastating wildfire, a family of sixth-generation ranchers in central California is forced to grapple with how society has changed, and with it, government policies and attitudes that pose an existential threat to their business and their lifestyle.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly
Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin’s largest inland lake, used to teem with wild rice. What happened to the rice, and how do we help restore it? An intertribal, interdisciplinary team is blending traditional ecological knowledge and western science to answer these questions.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly, Staff Pick
The film explores the lake sturgeon’s traditional role in Anishinaabe culture as told through interviews with community members across Michigan and examines how traditional beliefs have guided and revolutionized lake sturgeon restoration efforts in the Great Lakes.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Michigan Premiere, Student Filmmaker, Family Friendly
A student documentary exploring what drives people to keep going, and the people who show up to support them, Still Running follows the Anderson Lake Backyard Ultra, a grueling endurance race in the heart of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Family Friendly
An intimate documentary exploring the world of Dan Yagmin as the creative force behind Decoy Holds. It’s a portrait of an artist shaping not just holds, but the way we experience climbing itself.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Adult Language, Michigan Premiere, Adult Themes, Staff Pick
From Brooklyn’s concrete jungle to the heart of the Everglades, Black wildlife photographer George McKenzie Jr. is transforming his lens into a beacon of change. A rare gem in the predominantly white canvas of wildlife photography, McKenzie is empowering kids of color to shift their gaze to conservation.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Family Friendly, Representative in Attendance, Staff Pick
In Michigan’s Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, teams from around the world compete in the MATE International ROV Competition. In this competition, the Thomson family from Alpena competes brother against sister against sister against father. Who will triumph in this test of engineering skills in the Great Lakes?
Filmmaker in Attendance, Michigan Premiere
Lead poisoning is an ongoing public health emergency. This short documentary goes into the trenches with the workers and advocates fighting to replace lead pipes in Wisconsin, while revealing the human stakes of a water crisis that continues to put children at risk.
Michigan Premiere, Staff Pick
The last commercial fishermen of the Great Lakes struggle to survive as they face unprecedented ecological disasters, a changing climate, and outdated governmental regulations.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Michigan Premiere
Lake Michigan’s Green Bay is the world’s largest freshwater estuary, where the warm, nutrient-rich water of the Lower Fox River mixes with the cool water of the lake, creating an aquatic environment that supports a productive fishery, wetlands and a migratory flyway. The film turns to the people who care for this world of fish and birds as they seek understanding and look for solutions.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Michigan Premiere
In America’s Dairyland, many families only learn that the water coming from their wells is toxic once it’s far too late. The Right to Know follows people living with nitrate and bacterial contamination caused by factory farming, and shows how knowing what’s in your water can be a matter of life and death.
Filmmaker in Attendance, First Time Filmmaker
Water is Life covers issues facing the Great Lakes in brief yet explains how people around the region are doing something when it comes to the challenges they face. This is a synopsis of the longer documentary still in production.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Family Friendly
For four decades, volunteers with the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology have visited Wisconsin’s Baraboo Hills before dawn, gently netting and banding birds one by one. Year after year, the data adds up to something bigger - a long-term window into how bird populations are shifting across the country.
First Time Filmmaker, Student Filmmaker
Native plants improve outcomes for the environment, but are increasingly eliminated in favor of more “typical” garden plants. Learn how to make an impact on your local environment, and potentially yourself, by planting native species.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Subject in Attendance, Family Friendly, Michigan Premiere, First Time Filmmaker
Across the salt-sprayed shores of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, a gathering of Indigenous women comes together to rematriate wampum as a living system of justice, truth, and inherent relationship. Through practices of teaching, making, and collective remembrance, the film examines how patriarchal disruption, colonial extraction, and climate-driven coastal change threaten not only living shores but the relationships that sustain them.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Has Subtitles, Family Friendly, Representative in Attendance
For Tanya Raphael, maple season is a time for family, friends, and tradition. This film is part of the Leelanau Conservancy’s Indigenous Knowledges Project, dedicated to elevating Anishinaabe voices.