The 2026 United States Super 8 Film & Digital Video Festival, which is part of the Spring 2026 New Jersey Film Festival, takes place online and in-person on Saturday, February 21 and Sunday, February 22. Check out the Festival schedule and more info at this link: https://watch.eventive.org/newjerseyfilmfestivalspring2026 View the winning films and digital videos of the International United States Super 8 Film & Digital Video Festival, selected by a jury of filmmakers, Rutgers University student interns, and media professionals. The festival--now in its 38th year—will feature finalist works by independent filmmakers from the United States and around the world. Co-sponsored by Pro 8mm!
Annie, wake up is an experimental film by Laura Ivins, an experimental filmmaker based in Southern Indiana. Ivins has been working on this film for over a decade, beginning to collect footage in 2012. The project developed slowly over time and does not follow a traditional narrative. Instead, the film grew out of years of careful reflection and revisiting the material, and that thoughtful process is a big part of how it feels. The work carries a strong sense of time passing and allows meaning to form gradually rather than being forced.
Mixtape for Stom Sogo doesn’t feel like a documentary trying to explain its subject. It feels more like someone sitting with unresolved thoughts and letting them unfold. Directed by Adrian Goycoolea, the film is framed around a response to the last email he received from his friend Stom Sogo before he died. This is not a biography or a structured story. It’s a conversation with someone who isn’t there anymore, full of hesitation, memories, and questions that don’t get answered.
The Competition component of the Spring 2026 New Jersey Film Festival has just concluded! Overall, we had a good festival this year. We had a few screenings that were very well attended and a bunch with lower turnouts but that happens every festival for a variety of reasons. The in-person show attendance was about the same as our Festival last year, but the online viewership is what has kept us afloat financially since COVID broke in 2020. All the Official Selection works of the Spring 2026 New Jersey Film Festival were selected by a panel of judges including media professionals, journalists, students, and academics. These judges selected the 33 finalists which were publicly screened at our Festival. The finalists were selected from over 600 works submitted by filmmakers from around the world. In addition, the judges chose the Prize Winners in conjunction with the Festival Director. Here below are the winners of the Festival.
With Send Help, screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift have taken the basic setup of Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away (and its awful Madonna-starring, Guy Ritchie directed remake) and given it a gender swap. Here it's a lowly female employee who finds herself stranded on a desert island with her male boss. Much of Send Help explores the same class and sexual tensions as Wertmuller's film, but with Sam Raimi in the director's chair we know things are going to get a little crazy at some point. And, boy, do they!
With Send Help, screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift have taken the basic setup of Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away (and its awful Madonna-starring, Guy Ritchie directed remake) and given it a gender swap. Here it's a lowly female employee who finds herself stranded on a desert island with her male boss. Much of Send Help explores the same class and sexual tensions as Wertmuller's film, but with Sam Raimi in the director's chair we know things are going to get a little crazy at some point. And, boy, do they!
With Summer of Sam, Spike Lee suggested that in 1977 there was nowhere crazier than New York. With The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho asks Lee to hold his beer. If you thought '77 NYC was something, wait till you experience the Brazil of that year. In opening text, Mendonça Filho describes that era in his nation's troubled history as "a time of great mischief," and The Secret Agent is a gleefully mischievous movie. Like several recent high profile South American films, including last year's Brazilian drama I'm Still Here, it is concerned with the corruption that was rife under the military dictatorship. But just as Lee did for the bankruptcy era Big Apple, Mendonça Filho displays a fond nostalgia for the energy that can be created by dangerous times. There is much in The Secret Agent that is shocking, and it reminds us of the evil that is allowed to flourish in corrupt societies, but it's also heart-poundingly thrilling.
As movie settings go, the backdrop of Atropia is one of the more arresting you'll find. Actress Hailey Benton Gates' feature debut as writer/director is set in Fort Irwin, a sprawling US military training compound in the California desert where young men and women are acclimatised to whichever corner of the world they're set to be deployed. Within Fort Irwin is a 600,000 acre area known as "The Box," which is used to recreate foreign lands, filled with actors performing as natives and insurgents.
Whether it's True Grit, Leon: The Professional, Man on Fire or the recent Dust Bunny, movies love to pair off gruff tough guys with precocious young girls. It was only a matter of time before Jason Statham found himself in such a scenario, which is exactly what we get from director Ric Roman Waugh's Shelter.
Over the past decade, producer/director Timur Bekmambetov's name has become synonymous with the "screenlife" sub-genre. For those who are unaware, screenlife movies play out their narratives on the screens of laptops, tablets, phones and similar devices. Watching someone's desktop for 90 minutes may not sound too exciting but the format has proved surprisingly successful in thrillers like Unfriended, Searching and Profile. Much like the American horror movies of the 1970s took the genre out of its traditional Gothic setting of European castles and transferred it to the US suburbs, screenlife thrillers have a relatable immediacy, their thrills playing out on the sort of screens we stare at every day.
