The 12th Utopia Film Festival is coming up soon – this weekend – and I’ve been lucky enough to join the festival-planners as one of its screeners. That means getting together weekly to watch together some of the over 200 entrants for this year’s festival, and watching others at home via a special website used by film festivals around the world.

The festival’s most compelling event and one I won’t miss is when festival director Chris Haley –  Alex Haley’s nephew – shows clips from both the 1977 and 2016 versions of Roots and leads a panel discussion about this groundbreaking series with such experts as a historian from The Gambia! That’s all happening Saturday at 5 pm.

Completing the focus on the civil rights struggle, the festival includes the documentaries Neshoba: The Price of Freedom and Mississippi Cold Case. both about the murders of three civil rights workers during Freedom Summer of 1964.

Moving on to other highlights among the 40+ films being shown at this year’s festival, I was most struck by the international flavor of the entrees, with more than half of the applicants being filmmakers outside of the U.S., in my estimation.

For example, there’s Our Last Stand about an Assyrian-American school teacher from New York who spent her summer vacation traveling to Iraq and Syria to raise awareness about the plight of the Christian communities threatened by civil war and ISIS.

And there’s A Bold Peace, the inspiring story of Costa Rica’s 65-year long experiment in living without a military.

And on a more personal scale, there’s the short Fabrizio’s Initiation, about an Argentinian teenager’s quest for a love-nest.

Back in the USA, a Wisconsin teen’s 10-year struggle with drug addiction is chronicled through interviews and his own writings in the very moving Written Off.

And as a pet-owner (2 cats) I found Pet Fooled positively riveting. This documentary busts commonly held myths about what’s good for dogs and cats (hint – not kibble) and explores how just 5 companies control the market. Fortunately, no trigger warning is needed because it includes no scenes of animal abuse, just the real-deal about what dogs and cats need to eat and why.

The Schedule (click to enlarge)

Utopia’s on Youtube!

For more trailers of this year’s Utopia Film Festival, visit their Youtube Channel.