Open Screen: The Forum

Open Screen: The Forum is designed as a community building format that sits between a screening series, conference, and festival.

Open Screen began in 2021 at Public Functionary as gatherings where artists shared works-in-progress. Since then, it has showcased over 100 films and evolved to address gaps in the Twin Cities film ecosystem by creating spaces where BIPOC creators can share their work. Funded in part, by the Arts & Cultural Affairs Department in the City of Minneapolis through the Cultural Districts Art Fund – Open Screen: The Forum marks an expansion in 2025. This program centers QTBIPOC, immigrant, and underrepresented voices in film and photography through an extended series of events focused on storytelling, connection, and cultural exchange.

Open Screen: The Forum features a special collaboration with Cinefilmu, a separate film festival that will hold its main event in November 2025. Cinefilmu itself is a collaborative initiative between multiple artist collectives: Mamá Papaya, TDM5, and YAYASAGA. During Open Screen: The Forum, Cinefilmu will curate scenic installations exploring themes of kinship.The installations will stay on view during open hours for Art-A-Whirl weekend (May 16-18).

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS:

Film screenings include All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the debut feature by Raven Jackson. Released by A24 after its Sundance premiere, the film traces the life of a Black woman in Mississippi through quiet, poetic scenes—holding space for memory, grief, and love. The film reflects the kind of layered, intentional storytelling that The Forum was created to support.

The Forum is rooted in the urgency of this moment—for filmmakers, photographers, and artists who use image-making as a means of connection, resistance, and cultural storytelling. In the face of renewed threats to civil rights, bodily autonomy, and freedom of expression, The Forum offers space to gather, reflect, and respond. Programming speaks to all facets of making work—from political urgency to what it takes to make the work. Sessions range from panels on documenting social movements, to hands-on workshops in Steadicam operation and cyanotype patch printing as protest, to conversations about how to get a film financed and produced. Together, they reflect the many ways artists create, build, and push back.

Short film blocks programmed by local filmmakers highlight work from queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Hmong artists—spotlighting both new voices and more established makers across a wide range of styles and approaches. These films are bold, intimate, funny, devastating—each with its own language, all connected by a shared refusal to be overlooked.

Throughout the festival, Cinefilmu and YAYASAGA will present a scenic art installation, Granny’s House, that invites rest, celebration, and care. The installation is a holding space for the gathering itself—a place to land, to be with one another, and to remember why we come together in the first place.

You can find the full schedule here.

Image: Love Lessons in a Time of Settler Colonialism, Animation by Moira Villiard