33 films will screen at this year’s Blue Mountain Film + Media Festival (BMFM). The festival announced its 2026 selections today, including two world premieres, one North American premiere, and seven Canadian premieres. (Full disclosure: POV contributor Jason Gorber is the festival’s director of programming with POV’s Pat Mullen contributing to the line-up as an associate programmer.)
Documentary highlights include a special gala presentation of You Had To Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (In a Canadian Kind of Way). The film, a hit at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, revisits the 1972 Toronto production of the musical Godspell, which launched the careers of several screen icons including Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, and Jayne Eastwood. The latter will attend BMFM’s screening in recognition of her contribution to Canadian film and television.
Also attending the festival as a guest of honour is Women Talking’s Sheila McCarthy. She’ll be on hand opening night for the drama Dancing on the Elephant in which she stars opposite Mary Walsh as a woman who makes a new friend upon arriving at a retirement home. Amanda Brugel co-stars.
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Canadian documentaries screening at BMFM include Alison Reid’s The Art of Adventure, about Robert Bateman and Bristol Foster’s international tour in their Land Rover, The Grizzly Torque. Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie connects audiences with the Haitian Vodou roots of zombies and reclaims their significance after exploding into a brain-eating pop-culture phenomenon. BMFM also screens Jennifer Chiu’s Clan of the Painted Lady, which explores the filmmaker’s Hakka heritage and the cultural intersections that inform her experience, while the festival will screen Brad Abrahams and Simon Ennis’s conspiracy doc Gimme Truth on the heels of its world premiere at Hot Docs. BMFM wraps with the world premiere of Zack Thompson and Jake Thompson’s The Northmen Way: A Lacrosse Story. The documentary chronicles the legacy of the sport in Orangeville and creates an oral history of lacrosse through the voices of local legends who played on the team across generations.
On the international front, BMFM screens Elvira Lind’s King Hamlet, which follows her husband, actor Oscar Isaac, as he stages an ambitious production of Hamlet and faces intersections of art imitating life as he says goodbye to his father and welcomes a son into their family. The doc previously screened at Telluride, DOC NYC, and Palm Springs before heading up to Canada.
Also coming to the festival is Cookie Queens, Alysa Nahmias’ Sundance hit about the time-honoured tradition of Girl Scout cookie drives and the dark capitalist undercurrents they instill within new generations of entrepreneurs. Also nipping at the sweet spot is Sweet Störy, Sarah Justine Kerruish and Matthew Maude’s travelogue with pastry chef Meg Ray as she embarks on a trip to Sweden for cultural and culinary exchange.
The festival also features a trio of music docs. Making their Canadian premieres at Blue Mountain are Robert Gordon’s Newport & the Great Folk Dream about the titular music festival and Dayna Goldfine and Daniel Geller’s Peter Asher: Everywhere Man, which charts the story of an iconic hit-maker. BMFM includes a retro screening of Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind as part of its free outdoor series.
Rounding out the documentary side of BMFM are several hits from the festival circuit. Audience favourites continuing their runs include Tasha Van Zandt’s luminous portrait of marine biologist Dr. Edie Widder, A Life Illuminated. Meanwhile, John Dower’s The Balloonists equally demands the big screen experience for its adventure with aeronauts Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones during their historic 1999 world tour. Finally, Blue Mountain audiences can see two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot’s acclaimed feature debut, The Eyes of Ghana, which salutes the career of Chris Hesse, who chronicled and saved a history of Ghanaian images on film.
Canadian dramas at Blue Mountain include Matthew Poitras’ The Bruce Peninsula, which follows two half-brothers as they take a road trip to say goodbye to their late father. The film screens as a world premiere after debuting as a work-in-progress at Sudbury. Also screening is Mayumi Yoshida’s multi-award winner Akashi, a travelogue of its own as a Japanese-Canadian woman returns to Japan and confronts old memories. And in Andy Hines’ Little Lorraine, miners turned drug smugglers bring to life a true crime story from the East Coast, while Oscar winner Daniel Roher’s fiction debut Tuner hits the fest before its theatrical run.
Dramatic highlights at the festival include several Oscar contenders for Best International feature, including Egypt’s Happy Birthday by Sara Goher, Slovakia’s Father by Tereza Nvotová, Morocco’s Calle Málaga by Maryam Touzani, Switzerland’s Late Shift by Petra Volpe, and Spain’s nominee Sirāt by Oliver Laxe. Other films from around the world include Joonho Park’s debut 3670 about a North Korean defector navigating Seoul’s queer scene in search of community, while Anders Thomas Jensen’s dark comedy The Last Viking stars Mads Mikkelsen as a man who thinks he’s one of the Beatles.
Premieres coming to Blue Mountain include the Danish drama Hercules Falling by Christian Bonke, which takes a hybrid approach to a story of PTSD by inviting military veterans to enact a drama about mental health. Meanwhile, Mike Doyle’s Bookends offers an offbeat love story about an aspiring author who moves in with his grandparents after breaking up with his boyfriend and must confront the cognitive decline of his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who wants the family memories to endure. The films have their North American and Canadian premieres at Blue Mountain, respectively. This year’s festival runs May 28 to 31.
