Explore More Highlights from the 2026 Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival

I have returned from movie-watching boot camp, also known as the Minneapolis Saint Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF). I made it out to 17 screenings, including one shorts program, bringing my total films seen to 22!

I attended screenings at the Main Cinema in Minneapolis, the Capri Theater in North Minneapolis, and the Edina Mann Theatre. Every one brings its own charm, but I have always had a soft spot for the Main and used to travel over an hour from my hometown to see art films there alone in the dark. Those new chairs at Edina are hard to beat, though.

As I said in my earlier collection of reviews from the festival, there really weren’t any uniquely bad films. I liked far more than I disliked, and even the ones that weren’t for me had their positive qualities. So, instead of dealing out ratings, I’ve created a handful of categories to highlight some standouts of the fest. I would recommend all to various degrees based on what you’re looking for.

The Minnesota Spotlight: Normal, Bigfoot Woods, Woman Land

Bob Odenkirk in Normal. Magnolia Pictures

It’s a Minnesota festival, so I have to start with the deeply Minnesotan films I saw.

First up is Ben Wheatley’s Normal, the story of an unsuspecting interim Sheriff (Bob Odenkirk) who moves to the small freezing town of Normal, Minnesota, and quickly realizes that the townspeople are hiding something very sinister behind their “Minnesota Nice” smiles. This film is packed with action, violence, and kills; it gets the “not for me” label, but Odenkirk is so watchable that I was still able to enjoy my time. My one true qualm with Normal is that its Minnesotans are not nearly passive-aggressive enough.

Bigfoot Woods is a sweet feature set (and shot) in northern Minnesota that focuses on a family coming to terms with their child’s gender identity and expression. Father and son duo Bruce and Abel Pavalon spoke after the screening and shared that they wrote it during a similar period of adjustment in their own life. I was especially moved by their vulnerability and desire to create a film about trans people that faces the reality of coming-out head on but doesn’t end in heartbreak. All clues in the script lead me to believe that this fictional town was based on Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a place that’s very near and dear to my heart but, in my experience, can unfortunately feel harsh and unwelcoming as a queer person. And I admit I teared up as our main character, newly out Jonah (Ambrose Velasco Jenkins), gets reminded by his father Paul (Rich Sommer) that “this town is for everybody.”

I will never get tired of watching Minneapolis on the big screen. I love the rush of pride and irresistible urge to point out that you know exactly where that scene was shot. A new short film, Woman Land premiered to an equally excited crowd at MSPIFF that left the room wanting more. Directed by Yasmin Yassin, Woman Land follows two Somali sisters Sumaya (Nadira Hussein) and Hafsa (Hodan Hassan) and the growth of their secret internet matchmaking business that has everyone around them talking and wanting in on. This funny and beautifully shot short film feels like a Minneapolis classic in the making and I’d love to see more of it.

Sleeper Hits: Romería, The Blue Trail

Llúcia Garcia in Romería. Courtesy of 3Cat

These two films took me by surprise. I enjoyed watching then, but they caught me off guard by their story and characters lingering with me days later.

First is the story of young Marina (Llúcia Garcia) and her long-dead parents in Carla Símon’s Romería. Armed with her mother’s diary and in search of proper documentation of her birth records so she can apply to college, Marina travels to Spain’s Atlantic coast to meet her father’s family for the first time. Here she wonders things like what it means to share blood with people you hardly know and whether she can really trust the story she’s been told about her life. Romería is a gorgeous exploration of family, the stories (and lies) we choose to live in, and how to sort through the pieces of the hand you’ve been dealt in life.

I saw The Blue Trail on my very last day of the festival, my eyes and heart a little weary of anything that was going to be put in front of them. However, this quietly sci-fi and deeply human story of aging and autonomy really blew me away. The Blue Trail is set in a far-off future in the Amazon Rainforest where everyone over the age of 77 must retire to a “colony” to “rest.” Our spirited protagonist, Tereza (Denise Weinberg), wants anything but that, so she escapes into the forest and finds unlikely connections along the way. The film had one of my favorite scripts of the festival, balancing a wacky future world with moments of profound humanity.

Standout Performances: Erupcja, The Sun Rises on Us All

I am here to deliver the news like Paul Revere that Charli XCX is actually quite good in Erupcja! It could have been low-hanging fruit for her, playing a mysterious and detached party girl who ditches her boyfriend to go on a bender with her on-again, off-again bestie Nel (Lena Góra) while on a trip to Warsaw, Poland. But her performance works well in this highly stylized wisp of a film. I would even pitch to Mrs. XCX and director Pete Ohs to consider Erupjca as the music video for “Everything Is Romantic.”

Affectionately, I never want to see The Sun Rises on Us All ever again. Much of this has to do with the performance by lead Xin Zhilei, which was so raw and stunning I needed to lie down afterward. This Chinese melodrama about a pair of ex-lovers who reconnect after years apart is a gut-wrenching watch but gave me a complete understanding of Xin’s deserved Best Actress win at the Venice Film Festival. I will be thinking about her work in this for a long time.

My Favorites: Happy Birthday, Vanilla

Doha Ramadan in Happy Birthday. TAKA PR

It is by complete coincidence that my two favorites of the festival are films led by child actors, but I think these works beautifully capture the innocence of childhood in ways that very much moved me.

Vanilla follows a family of seven women in their fight to save their home from foreclosure in 1990s Mexico. Told mainly through the eyes of the youngest of the pack, eight-year-old Roberta (Aurora Dávila), this is a beautiful film about womanhood, family, and how to survive in a male-dominated world. I am a huge proponent of celebrating “women’s wrongs” in film (think Practical Magic or Thelma and Louise), but really, I am a huge sucker for films that celebrate everything that it means to be a woman and the one thing that I have known to be certain: The only way we will survive is by the women who are at our side. Vanilla is all of that and more, with a killer soundtrack of my favorite Mexican music (“Los Caminos de la Vida” will never not make me cry).

While I really love both of these films, Egyptian director Sarah Goher’s Happy Birthday takes my personal best-of-fest award. All eight-year-old Toha wants is to attend her friend Nelly’s ninth birthday party; however, as a viewer who inhabits this messed-up adult world, we know this will be a much more difficult endeavor than she understands. Her family is very poor, and the birthday girl is actually the daughter of the family Toha works for as a maid. Though aware of the realities of her work, she does not understand the societal implications of child labor that would bar her from spending time with a person she believes to be her best friend on her special day. Doha Ramadan, who stars as Toha, carries this film on her tiny shoulders in a way that absolutely astounded me. One of the best performances from a child that I have ever seen.

I left MSPIFF45 feeling very inspired, and I’m hopeful that any of these films could do the same for you. I also want to reiterate the importance of seeing and supporting “smaller” works from all over the world so that these beautiful stories can be accessible to all through bigger distributing deals or with more financing to get them made and seen. With emerging AI at every turn and our studios here in the US at risk of complete monopoly and right-wing control, it is imperative that we remember the deeply human role that movies and filmmaking have played and will always play in making us feel a little bit bigger, safer, and connected in this world.