Washington Summer Film Festival
The Themed Section · 17 Features

War & Peace

Tolstoy needed 1,200 pages; we offer seventeen films. This year's Filmfest DC award winners, together with twelve nominated selections from 2024–2025, trace the full arc of conflict — the front line, the occupied home, the courtroom, the archive — and the quieter work that follows: return, restitution, remembrance, repair. Festival screenings present the five award winners (dates and times to be announced); the twelve nominees compete for our awards, revealed at the Closing Night ceremony, August 9.

Part 01

The Filmfest DC 2026 Award Winners

Five features honored in April, seen anew through the lens of war and peace.

Audience Award · Best Feature Still from Primavera: a young violinist performs in eighteenth-century Venice

Primavera

Directed by Damiano Michieletto · Italy, France · 2025 · 110 min · Italian with English subtitles

In early eighteenth-century Venice, the fate of a virtuoso violinist named Cecilia (Tecla Insolia) is transformed when her orphanage hires an ambitious composer as its new musical instructor: Antonio Vivaldi. As the young women's ensemble enchants audiences and patrons, Cecilia is promised to a decorated army official upon his return from the battlefield. With an arranged marriage looming, she awakens to the power of her musical gift and its possibilities for an independent destiny.

Art flourishing in the shadow of war — our Opening Night film.

FictionPeace & the Home Front
Date & Time TBARegal Gallery Place — Opening Night Date & Time TBAThe Wharf, Transit Pier — Free outdoor screening
Audience Award · Best Documentary Still from The Essence of Eva: singer Eva Cassidy

The Essence of Eva

Directed by Alex Fegan & Malcolm Willis · Ireland · 2025 · 82 min · English

When Sting admits he "stole" the arrangement from the singer who recorded what is likely the definitive version of his own song "Fields of Gold," he is referring to a world-class artist. This revealing portrait of Bowie, Maryland's own Eva Cassidy — who labored in mostly local obscurity before dying of cancer at only 33 — emerges through home movies and interviews with bandmates, family, friends, and the likes of Mick Fleetwood.

Our grace note: the peace a voice can make, and what a community holds after loss.

DocumentaryHealing & Memory
Date & Time TBAThe Wharf, Transit Pier — Free outdoor screening Date & Time TBARegal Gallery Place
Ted Pedas Award Still from Diya: a driver on the roads of N'Djamena

Diya

Directed by Achille Ronaimou · Chad, France, Germany, Ivory Coast · 2025 · 96 min · French with English subtitles

Achille Ronaimou's electrifying debut feature tells the story of Dane, a driver for a humanitarian NGO, and the whirlwind moment when he runs over a young schoolboy. Accused of killing the boy, he must pay a blood debt — an unthinkable sum he does not have. Twisting through the roads of N'Djamena all the way to the north of Chad, Dane's desperate search to save his family takes him down a dangerous path.

The ancient machinery of restitution: the price a society sets on making peace after harm.

FictionJustice & Restitution
Date & Time TBARegal Gallery Place
Arabian Sights Award Still from Happy Birthday: eight-year-old Toha in Cairo

Happy Birthday

Directed by Sarah Goher · Egypt · 2025 · 92 min · Arabic with English subtitles

Sarah Goher's acclaimed debut feature is a tour (de force) of modern-day Cairo, from its upper-class enclaves to its streets teeming with motor scooters and life, seen through the beautifully observed world of 8-year-old Toha. Working as a maid in an upper-class home, Toha — who has never had a birthday party of her own — resolves that her "friend" Nelly will have the perfect one. Captivating child actor Doha Ramadan carries the film.

The invisible conflicts of class, running through a household, a city, a childhood.

FictionInvisible Conflicts
Date & Time TBARegal Gallery Place
Justice Matters Award Still from Everybody to Kenmure Street: a crowd fills a Glasgow street

Everybody to Kenmure Street

Directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra · UK · 2026 · 98 min · English

This Sundance award-winning documentary about ordinary citizens spontaneously uniting to resist a hostile immigration raid could hardly be timelier. May 13, 2021, happened to be Eid in the diverse Glasgow neighborhood of Pollokshields — the day the Home Office chose for a surprise dawn arrest of two men who had been part of the community for ten years. To take them, the police would first have to get past hundreds of their Kenmure Street neighbors, and "Van Man," who placed himself under the police van and would not budge.

Closing Night — followed by the panel "Neighbors: Civic Peace in Practice."

DocumentaryCivil Resistance
Sun Aug 9 · Time TBARegal Gallery Place — Closing Night & Awards Ceremony
Part 02

The Twelve Nominees

The 2026 Official Selection: twelve nominated features completed in 2024–2025 and drawn from the international festival circuit. These films are in competition for the festival's awards, announced at the Closing Night ceremony on August 9 — the winners will then be brought to Washington screens.

Official Selection · Nominee She's in Jail film poster

She's in Jail

Directed by Tomoko Ako · Japan, Hong Kong · 2024 · 104 min · Cantonese, Japanese, and English with English subtitles

Chow Hang-tung, a Hong Kong barrister and human rights defender, was imprisoned under the National Security Law for commemorating the Tiananmen crackdown. Opening moments before her 2021 arrest, Tokyo scholar Tomoko Ako's documentary traces her unyielding fight through the voices of friends and fellow activists — a portrait of conscience assembled from the outside, because the film cannot be shown where she is held.

A war fought without weapons: one lawyer's work of peace, measured out in prison terms.

DocumentaryConscience on Trial
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee Warfare film poster

Warfare

Directed by Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza · USA, UK · 2025 · 95 min · English

Reconstructed in real time from the collective memory of the Navy SEALs who lived it, a single 2006 surveillance mission in Ramadi collapses into chaos. Co-directed by one of the platoon's own veterans, this is a stripped-down, unblinking account of combat as the men on the ground actually experienced it — no score, no heroics, no relief.

The front line at eye level, one hour at a time.

FictionThe Front Line
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee War Game film poster

War Game

Directed by Jesse Moss & Tony Gerber · USA · 2024 · 94 min · English

An unscripted role-play exercise puts real former governors, senators, and military officers in the Situation Room to confront an insurrection on a future Inauguration Day. What begins as a simulation becomes a stress test of democracy's ability to keep the peace at home — with the clock running and no script to save anyone.

Filmed twenty minutes from our screens: the war game about keeping the peace in Washington.

DocumentaryPeace at Home
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee Timestamp film poster

Timestamp

Directed by Kateryna Gornostai · Ukraine, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands · 2025 · 125 min · Ukrainian with English subtitles

Across Ukraine, a school year unfolds: waltz rehearsals, graduation bells, air-raid drills, classes held in basements and over video calls from destroyed towns. Without interviews or narration, Gornostai's patient documentary watches a generation grow up insisting on ordinary life in wartime.

The quietest war film in the section — and perhaps the most devastating.

DocumentaryGrowing Up in Wartime
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee My Dead Friend Zoe film poster

My Dead Friend Zoe

Directed by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes · USA · 2024 · 101 min · English

An Afghanistan veteran shares her civilian life with the wisecracking ghost of her dead Army best friend, while her Vietnam-vet grandfather slips into decline at the family lake house. A dark comedy about survivor's guilt from a director who served five years in the Army himself.

Coming home is its own campaign — fought in kitchens, group therapy, and lakeside sheds.

FictionComing Home
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee The Village Next to Paradise film poster

The Village Next to Paradise

Directed by Mo Harawe · Somalia, Austria, France, Germany · 2024 · 133 min · Somali with English subtitles

In a windswept Somali village under the distant hum of drones, a gravedigger, his newly divorced sister, and his adopted son piece together a family and a future. Harawe's patient, tender debut is a drama about everyday endurance in a place the world only sees through the language of conflict.

War as background radiation — and a family's stubborn, everyday work of building a peaceful life anyway.

FictionLiving Beneath the War
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee Meeting with Pol Pot film poster

Meeting with Pol Pot

Directed by Rithy Panh · France, Cambodia · 2024 · 112 min · French and Khmer with English subtitles

In 1978, three French visitors are granted a rare tour of Democratic Kampuchea, where the staged villages slowly give way to the machinery of genocide. Rithy Panh, who survived the regime as a boy, returns to the question that has shaped his life's work: how a nation remembers what it was forced to forget.

The lie a regime shows its guests — and the price of pretending to believe it.

FictionMemory & Denial
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee Checkpoint Zoo film poster

Checkpoint Zoo

Directed by Joshua Zeman · USA, UK · 2024 · 107 min · English and Ukrainian with English subtitles

When the front line cut Kharkiv's Feldman Ecopark off from the city, a handful of zookeepers and student volunteers ran a 71-day mission to evacuate thousands of animals under shellfire. A story about what people will risk to protect the defenseless when war arrives at the gate.

Compassion under bombardment — the section's most unlikely rescue story.

DocumentaryRescue Under Fire
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee Yalla Parkour film poster

Yalla Parkour

Directed by Areeb Zuaiter · Palestine, Sweden, Qatar, Saudi Arabia · 2024 · 89 min · Arabic and English with English subtitles

From her home in Washington, a Palestinian filmmaker strikes up a long-distance friendship with a young parkour athlete who vaults across Gaza's ruins. Filmed over years, it becomes a double portrait of exile and confinement — and of movement as a form of freedom.

Made between our city and a city under siege: the shortest distance in the program.

DocumentaryExile & Motion
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee Cover-Up film poster

Cover-Up

Directed by Laura Poitras & Mark Obenhaus · USA · 2025 · 117 min · English

From My Lai to Abu Ghraib, reporter Seymour Hersh has spent six decades dragging the hidden costs of American wars into the light. Built from his own notes and archives, the film argues that accountability is the unglamorous groundwork of any real peace.

Sixty years of asking Washington the questions it least wants answered.

DocumentaryAccountability
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee The Damned film poster

The Damned

Directed by Roberto Minervini · Italy, USA, Belgium · 2024 · 89 min · English

Winter, 1862. A company of U.S. Army volunteers is sent to patrol the unmapped western territories, far from any front. Nothing arrives but weather, doubt, and the occasional crack of gunfire in the trees. Minervini's hushed, painterly anti-Western strips the Civil War of battle and glory to ask its soldiers' own question: what are we fighting for?

American history, seen from its quietest and most unsettling angle.

FictionThe Waiting War
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9
Official Selection · Nominee Men of War film poster

Men of War

Directed by Jen Gatien & Billy Corben · USA, Canada · 2024 · 103 min · English and Spanish with English subtitles

A decorated Green Beret turned private contractor leads a ragtag seaborne invasion of Venezuela in 2020 — and narrates his own fiasco with undimmed conviction. A tragicomic portrait of a veteran who never found a way home from war, so he kept looking for new ones.

What a country's wars leave behind: men still fighting long after everyone else has gone home.

DocumentarySoldiers Without a War
Nominee2026 Official Selection · In competition — winners announced at the Awards Ceremony, Aug 9

Seventeen films. One conversation.

Award-winner screenings — dates & times to be announced · Tickets $15 · Galas $20 · The Wharf outdoor screenings are free.

Full Schedule