For its 2025 edition, the Nova Frontier Film Festival returns with an enduring and urgent theme—Freedom—expanding its exploration of cinema as a space for radical imagination, resistance, and transformation. Presented by Harlem Stage in New York, this year’s festival offers a powerful lineup of films, conversations, performances, and more that examine the myriad choices—both monumental and intimate—that shape our journeys toward liberation.

Acts of Freedom, the curatorial focus of the festival, showcases personal and collective stories from filmmakers across the African Diaspora, the Middle East, and Latin America. Whether exploring resistance, migration, love, or self-determination, each film speaks to the agency we hold in crafting our narratives and forging new frontiers. These cinematic works invite us to reflect on freedom not as a destination but as an ongoing, active practice.

A highlight of this year’s festival is a special spotlight on female filmmakers, by programmer Nanor Vosgueritchian, featuring stories centered on youth and women who disrupt the status quo, reclaim agency, and navigate cultural stigmas with defiant clarity. These characters offer bold reimaginings of freedom from the margins, where survival itself becomes an act of transformation.

Among the standout selections is Raoul Peck’s powerful new documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, which revives global interest in the pioneering South African photographer, presented by Harlem-based legendary photographer Ming Smith and photographer Dylan Golden. Cole, who died in exile in Manhattan in 1990, used his lens to expose the brutal realities of apartheid and capture the quiet resilience of Black South Africans. His vision extended beyond South Africa—his time in Harlem and New York deeply informed both his political consciousness and visual language.

Also featured is Souleymane’s Story (L'Histoire de Souleymane), directed by Boris Lojkine (France, 2024). The film follows an undocumented Guinean immigrant (played by Abou Sangaré, winner of the Un Certain Regard Best Actor prize at Cannes) as he juggles life as a food delivery courier in Paris while preparing for his asylum hearing—an intimate portrait of the precarity and determination of life on the margins.

Having its World Premiere is First It Was My Dream, directed by Shaena Golden and beautifully lensed by Dylan Golden, offers a timely and intimate portrait of immigration through the eyes of Mexican boxer Andy Dominguez. In the ring, he fights for glory; outside of it, he confronts deeper battles for identity and belonging as an undocumented immigrant in America. The film opens with Andy’s harrowing account of crossing the border to reunite with his mother after five years apart—an experience that shaped his understanding of struggle long before he ever laced up his gloves.

As we navigate an era marked by social, political, and ecological upheaval, Nova Frontier Film Festival 2025 invites audiences to witness, reflect on, and actively engage in the ever-evolving pursuit of freedom—one act, one story, and one bold choice at a time.

Thursday, JUNE 5 TH - 7:00 PM

The festival opens with four compelling short films that poignantly capture the essence of the Nova Frontier Film Festival. Each work reflects the spirit of the regions represented and the overarching theme of Freedom, offering intimate portraits of people navigating the maelstrom of their seemingly ordinary lives—through dreams, work, rituals, love, and the in-between. Through deeply personal and often poetic storytelling, these films explore both individual and collective experiences, laying a resonant foundation for the diverse and impactful narratives that will unfold throughout the festival.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM 2 - UNBELONGING

Curated and Presented by Nanor Vosgueritchian

This selection of short films follows young women from across the globe as they navigate pivotal moments in their lives. While reflecting on their journeys of displacement and feelings of unbelonging, these characters are also faced with potentially transformative experiences. They must make decisions that will affect not just themselves, but also the people around them. It’s a heavy burden to bear, and one that is either eased or exacerbated by family and friends. Mainly helmed by innovative female filmmakers, these films explore the newfound interests, relationships, and sexual desires of their characters. Through time, they learn that personal choice and freedom often come at a price.

4:00 PM - 6 PM

This experimental and lively section of the program, moderated by Billy Gerard Frank, Artist, Filmmaker, and Co-Founder of NFFF, brings together filmmakers, photographers, spoken word artists, and activists to discuss, screen, and perform works that blur the lines between art and activism. It aims to explore and challenge polarized debates around diaspora, exile, transnationalism, borders, and migration. Dylan Golden, Photographer, Producer, and Cinematographer of First It Was My Dream, and Amanda Sarabia, Producer of First It Was My Dream, and more TBA. Through multiple global perspectives, these works and artists reflect on the complexities of place and belonging, both personal and collective, while offering nuanced narratives of movement, displacement, and return.

At its core, this program foregrounds the urgency of art that resists. Art as resistance—restice—becomes a vital mode of expression and intervention, confronting systems of exclusion and amplifying silenced voices. These works do not simply represent experience; they engage in acts of refusal, reimagining, and radical care. They remind us that in fractured times, creativity remains essential to survival, solidarity, and transformation.

THANK YOU TO ALL OUR FILMAKERS, PARTNERS, HARLEM STAGE, AND OUR AUDIENCE!