Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival 2020

"Imagine Better"

The Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies is pleased to announce the 27th annual Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival, "Imagine Better".

What we imagine fuels our intentions. The 27th annual Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival asks us to Imagine Better. This season we present films from around the world offering creative, often startlingly original visions that rethink approaches to myriad environmental challenges encounters with otherness various kinds and our very understanding of fantasy, history, family, friends, and neighbors. If the future we imagine is the future we get, then we desperately need to imagine better: we need to better our powers of imagination so that we can imagine better possibilities. Collectively, the works in the season's program suggest just how we might do that as they imagine alternatives to familiar patterns of thinking, relating, and being. Traversing imaginative stories and fantastic encounters from Israel and Palestine to Iceland and Japan, from intersectional Chicago to a field in Maine seen through multiple perspectives, the films of this year’s Festival creatively cross borders and cross-up border enforcement, celebrate youth and honor age, and they show how opportunities are created by imagining possiblities. They ask us, they show us, and they hope that we can learn to Imagine Better.

Films will be screened on Wednesday evenings at 7:30 pm starting on February 26, 2020, through April 22, 2020, in the Flavin Family Auditorium SOM 137 (unless otherwise noted). All events are accompanied by critical, contextualizing introductions by scholars and filmmakers and all are, as always, free and open to the public.

Presented by the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Shawn Shimpach, Festival Director
Daniel Pope, Co-curator