5 Films to See at the 2026 Maryland Film Festival

It’s April and the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF) is back, just five months after its last iteration, running April 8-12. This is time of year when the fest has traditionally been held (more or less), so in a world of rapid change, some things are returning to normal. As always, the programming is strong, with shorts, features, and immersive art experiences on offer for a variety of tastes. All information about all screenings (and how to get tickets) is available on the MdFF website. Below, I offer my recommendations of five films to see.

Barbara Forever (Brydie O’Connor, 2026) [excerpted from my Hammer to Nail review out of Sundance]

The late, great experimental, queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) left behind a treasure trove of work worthy not only of exhibition but of preservation. This is exactly how Brydie O’Connor’s documentary Barbara Forever begins, in a museum—Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the films and other material now reside—as Hammer’s life partner, Florrie Burke, pays a visit to commune with old friends. From there, we proceed on a comprehensive journey through the life and career of a seminal artist.

Bouchra (Orian Yani Barki/Meriem Bennani)

An animated drama about a queer Moroccan woman living in Brooklyn, with flashbacks to the homeland interspersed throughout the present, Bouchra—the title character of which is portrayed as a canid and voiced by co-director Meriem Bennani—presents a colorful world full of vibrant characters. The semi-autobiographical story centers on self-actualization and combines real archival footage of Casablanca, phone conversations with an actress standing in for Bennani’s actual mother, and vivid images (where everyone is a different kind of animal) that propel the coming-out narrative forwards. If ultimately we have seen this kind of intricate personal piece before, we have not seen done in exactly this kind of way.

Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Lynne Sachs)

Continuing the personal and experimental theme of the festival, Lynne Sachs’ Every Contact Leaves a Tracefollows the director as she works her way through old business cards to explore the way that people’s lives intersect and then drift apart. She bases her ideas on Dr. Edmond Locard’s “exchange principle”—the foundation of all modern forensic science—which states: “Trace evidence can be used to link people or objects to places, other people, or other objects. It often serves as a starting point for a line of investigation.” And so this intriguing, sometimes oblique, movie goes, Sachs (Film About a Father Who) acting as our guide through an exploration of the resonance of meetings, no matter how fleeting.

House (Nobuhiko Obayashi)

Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 experimental horror film was apparently originally inspired by the 1975 American film Jaws, though you would never guess that just by watching it. A group of young women travel for what they think is a weekend getaway to the home of one friend’s aunt … except that the aunt is actually a malevolent spirit bent on eating all of them. Filled with wild and giddy images and music, the movie is a must-see for genre fans and anyone looking to have their mind blown. The MdFF always screens a few revivals, and if you haven’t yet watched this one, be sure to check it out Friday night.

Ugly Cry (Emily Robinson) [excerpted from my Hammer to Nail review out of SXSW]

In her first feature, Ugly Cry, writer/director/star Emily Robinson delivers a compelling meditation on how the harsh gaze—male, female, and even one’s own—within cinematic systems built on exploitation inevitably leads to terrible outcomes. A young actress who should be focusing on performance instead becomes obsessed with making her face show as little actual emotion as possible. You wouldn’t want to scare people with the ugliness of real pain, now, would you?

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.