Santa Fe International Film Festival Opens With 175 Films

What changed

The 18th Santa Fe International Film Festival opened Wednesday with 175 films and more than 300 hours of screenings and events across the city. It runs through Monday, with 65 new feature films, more than 100 shorts, local productions and appearances including Zahn McClarnon, known for playing Lt. Joe Leaphorn in Dark Winds.

Some of the festival’s most prominent offerings were already sold out on opening day. All-access passes were gone, as were screenings of Fjord and I Play Rocky.

Why it matters

The festival is doing more than filling cinema seats. It is turning New Mexico’s own history into material for the screen.

That is clearest in Radon’s Daughters, Siena Sofia Bergt’s horror film about two grieving families who meet during Día de los Muertos at an abandoned, uranium-contaminated church. Bergt drew on stories from Agua Fría and the history of a Siler Road laundromat that cleaned clothing from Los Alamos National Laboratory tainted with radioactive substances.

Her central fear is simple: contamination can be invisible until it is too late. That gives the film a distinctly local unease. The horror is not imported from some distant haunted house; it grows out of memories tied to laboratories, mines and acequias.

Other films widen the festival’s reach. Burn, Scar documents the 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The opening-night film, In Memoriam, stars Marc Maron as an actor with six months to live who becomes determined to make the Academy’s list of artists and filmmakers who died the previous year. On Friday, McClarnon will receive the festival’s Visionary Award, alongside a discussion with Dark Winds executive producer Chris Eyre and a Season 4 episode screening.

The festival’s strongest measure may be what happens after the closing day. Officials said films screened last year produced 13 Oscar nominations. Whether this year’s selections generate a similar awards run is unknown, but the early sellouts show that the event has already created demand before its films reach wider screens.