Guest Blog written by John Andrews, Creative Collective
Some films play by the rules. They find a compelling subject, follow it faithfully, and deliver something solid and safe. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the films that tend to stay with you longest are the ones made by people who decided the rules didn’t apply to them. These are the filmmakers who found subjects who lived the same way.
Salem Film Fest 2026 is full of both kinds. This guide is for the second kind.
These are the films about artists who refused the obvious path, communities who built something outside the system, and individuals who looked at what was expected of them and said no — then made something extraordinary from the wreckage. Purchase tickets at salemfilmfest.com.
The Rule-Breakers
BARBARA FOREVER
Friday, March 27th, 6:45 PM @ Cinema Salem Filmmaker Attending — Live Q&A | East Coast Premiere Content Warning: Nudity
If there’s a patron saint of creative non-compliance in this year’s lineup, it’s Barbara Hammer. Over a career spanning more than eighty films, Hammer did something simple and radical. She made exactly the films she wanted to make, in exactly the way she wanted to make them, without apology. Her work — unapologetically lesbian, formally adventurous, urgently personal — helped invent a whole tradition of cinema. Hollywood had no interest in creating that tradition.
Director Brydie O’Connor’s debut feature draws on Hammer’s vast archive of films and unreleased materials. It lets Hammer’s own voice and images carry the story. As a result, the film is less a biography than an immersion. It is a portrait of what a creative life looks like when it’s lived entirely on its own terms. Salem Film Fest is proud to give this film its East Coast premiere; it grew out of the short LOVE, BARBARA, which screened here in 2023.
CELTIC UTOPIA
Friday, March 27th, 6:50 PM @ National Park Visitor Center Filmmaker Attending — Live Q&A | East Coast Premiere
Nobody told the punks and hip-hop artists of modern Ireland that they were supposed to fall in love with ancient Gaelic folk music. They did it anyway — and what came out the other side is one of the most alive musical movements in Europe right now. CELTIC UTOPIA follows this folk renaissance as both a cultural story and a political one, tracing how a post-colonial society wrestles with a tradition it was nearly stripped of. The artists here aren’t preservationists. Instead, they’re insurgents who found an old weapon and figured out new ways to use it.
TORNADO TASTES LIKE ALUMINUM STING
Friday, March 27th, 2:00 PM @ Peabody Essex Museum World Premiere
For most of their life, Harmon — an autistic, queer, nonbinary playwright — worked in obscurity. Unhoused for a time. Housebound for ten years. Always creating. TORNADO TASTES LIKE ALUMINUM STING traces the making of a groundbreaking new play by Harmon, and the film itself refuses every normative convention in the process: nonlinear structure, hallucinogenic animation by Soul Proprietor (a studio of autistic artists), and a logic that follows neurodivergent perception rather than bending itself into a shape audiences expect. This is a World Premiere — one of the most formally daring shorts in the festival.
BLOOD & GUTS
Friday, March 27th, 9:25 PM @ Cinema Salem Filmmaker Attending — Live Q&A | New England Premiere Content Warning: Fake blood and gore
The Adams family — Toby, Zelda, Lulu, and John — makes indie horror films together. They lack conventional boundaries, conventional budgets, and conventional ideas about what a family creative practice should look like. Directors Carlye Rubin, Katie Green, and Tina Grapenthin portrait a household where the personal and the artistic are completely inseparable, and where the mess of making things is treated as a feature, not a bug. A love letter to everyone who’s ever built something strange and real with the people closest to them.
The Ones Who Rewrote the Script
TRUE NORTH
Saturday, March 28th, 10:30 AM @ Cinema Salem New England Premiere
In the 1960s, Montréal was quietly becoming a global nexus of Black liberation — a fact that has been almost entirely written out of mainstream historical narratives. Director Michèle Stephenson uses never-before-seen archival footage and intimate first-person testimony to recover two pivotal, underrecognized events: the Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams Affair. TRUE NORTH is the story of people who understood that the official version of history was a choice, not a fact — and who chose differently.
ALGERIA. Algiers. 1st Panafrican Cultural festival. Thursday, July 24th 1969. At the University. US poets Ted JOANS (center) and Don LEE (on the left) at a meeting on New Black Poetry.
JARIPEO
Saturday, March 28th, 8:50 PM @ Cinema Salem New England Premiere
Every Christmas in Penjamillo, Michoacán, the annual jaripeo — a central Mexican rodeo — performs a very specific idea of masculinity for the whole town. Beneath the spectacle, a queer subculture exists in the gaps. Director Efraín Mojica, who grew up between Penjamillo and Riverside, California, blends personal memory, Super 8 footage, and raw vérité to build intimate portraits of three lives shaped by tradition, desire, and identity. As a result, JARIPEO is quiet, precise, and deeply subversive in the best possible way.
NIÑXS
Sunday, March 29th, 12:15 PM @ Peabody Essex Museum Filmmaker Attending via Recorded Q&A | Massachusetts Premiere | Co-presented by Panorama Film Festival and WickedQueer Content Warning: Depictions of transphobia; staged images of death and gore
Fifteen-year-old Karla is navigating adolescence, a rural Mexican town that doesn’t understand her, and the decision to legally transition. She's telling her own story, on her own terms, alongside trans filmmaker Kani Lapuerta. Kani has collaborated with her since childhood. NIÑXS refuses the tragedy narrative. Instead, it’s nuanced, joyful, and intergenerational — a coming-of-age story made by and for people who’ve had enough of other people deciding what their story should look like.
FARRUQUITO, A FLAMENCO DYNASTY
Saturday, March 28th, 1:20 PM @ Peabody Essex Museum Filmmaker Attending — Live Q&A | New England Premiere | Co-presented by CineFest Latino Boston Film Festival
Farruquito inherited a dynasty. At 20, already celebrated as the finest flamenco dancer of his generation, he faced an accident, a pedestrian’s death, and a prison sentence. He came back anyway. Directors Santi Aguado and Reuben Atlas follow the full arc of his story alongside his grandfather Farruco — a genuine innovator of the form — and his son El Moreno, who now carries the weight of what the family name means. This is a film about what it costs to be exceptional, to fall, and to return.
The Outsiders Who Built Something Anyway
ELEPHANTS & SQUIRRELS
Sunday, March 29th, 12:00 PM @ National Park Visitor Center Filmmaker Attending via Recorded Q&A | United States Premiere
In 2019, Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige discovered something in Swiss museums: ancestral remains and cultural objects from her indigenous community, brought to Basel by European explorers in the early 20th century and never returned. She decided to do something about it. ELEPHANTS & SQUIRRELS follows her fight for repatriation alongside community leader Uru Warige Wannila Aththo, sparking a larger debate about art restitution and what it means to decolonize a museum. An act of creative and political non-compliance dressed as a documentary.
TO USE A MOUNTAIN
Sunday, March 29th, 12:25 PM @ Cinema Salem Filmmaker Attending — Live Q&A | New England Premiere
Six rural American communities have been identified as candidates for a burial site for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste. Against the impassive machinery of government process, director Casey Carter finds something more interesting. This is a people’s history of resistance, stewardship, and deep attachment to land. TO USE A MOUNTAIN is a film about what happens when ordinary people refuse to accept that decisions about their home will be made without them.
Practical Notes
Friday night scheduling conflict. BARBARA FOREVER and CELTIC UTOPIA screen simultaneously on Friday at 6:45 and 6:50 PM respectively — at Cinema Salem and the National Park Visitor Center. Both are essential for anyone following this guide. Check the full schedule at salemfilmfest.com and plan accordingly.
Shorts programs are worth your time. TORNADO TASTES LIKE ALUMINUM STING screens as part of the So Close, So Far: Arts and Culture in Our Hometowns shorts program on Friday, March 27 at 2:00 PM at the Peabody Essex Museum. The film screens alongside three other strong shorts. The program runs about 90 minutes and is one of the hidden gems of the festival weekend.
Tickets. Individual tickets are $16. The 5-ticket pack ($75) and 10-ticket pack ($145) are worth it if you’re planning a full weekend. Book at salemfilmfest.com or in person at the SFF Ticket Desks at Cinema Salem and the Peabody Essex Museum.
Creative non-compliance isn’t a style. It’s a posture — a refusal to accept that the story has already been told, the form has already been settled, or the outcome has already been decided. The films in this guide were made by people who didn’t accept any of that. Spend a weekend with them in Salem and see what that looks like when it works.
Salem Film Fest 2026 runs March 26–29. Full schedule and tickets at salemfilmfest.com.
