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Ava DuVernay named Jury President of the inaugural festival

Ava DuVernay at the Peabody Awards, accepting the award for 13th. Photo: Stephanie Moreno / Peabody Awards (CC BY-SA 2.0).

WASHINGTON, DC — The Washington Summer Film Festival today named Ava DuVernay Jury President of its inaugural edition. An Academy Award–nominated filmmaker and a member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — where she represents the Directors Branch and votes on the Oscars — DuVernay will preside over the festival jury that selects the winners among the thirty-two nominated features of the Global Panorama and Light of Peace sections. The awards will be announced at the Closing Night ceremony on August 1.

DuVernay is among the most consequential American directors of her generation. Her civil-rights drama Selma (2014) became the first film directed by an African American woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Her Netflix documentary 13th (2016) earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature — the first for a Black woman in a feature directing category — and went on to win a Peabody Award, a BAFTA, and an Emmy. Her limited series When They See Us received sixteen Emmy nominations; with Disney's A Wrinkle in Time, she became the highest-grossing Black woman director in U.S. box-office history.

"Ava DuVernay has spent her career asking the questions our Light of Peace section was built to ask — who bears the cost of conflict, who does the work of repair, and how cinema can hold both. We could not imagine a better guide for our first jury." — Tony Gittens, Founder and Festival Director

Before turning to directing, DuVernay worked as a film publicist and founded the distribution and advocacy collective ARRAY, which has brought dozens of films by women and filmmakers of color to theaters and streaming platforms. She won the Directing Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for Middle of Nowhere, and in 2023 became the first African American woman director to compete at the Venice Film Festival with Origin.

As Jury President, DuVernay will lead a panel of filmmakers, curators, and critics — to be announced — in deliberating the festival's awards for Best Feature, Best Documentary, and special jury citations across both sections. She will also appear at the Closing Night awards ceremony at Regal Gallery Place.

Meet the Jury President →

Festival Tour to visit five mid-Atlantic cities, August 6 – 29

WASHINGTON, DC — The Washington Summer Film Festival today announced the full itinerary of its Festival Tour, a five-city traveling program that brings five featured selections to historic independent cinemas across the mid-Atlantic after the festival's August 1 closing night.

The tour opens August 6–8 at the Avalon Theatre, Washington's oldest operating movie house, before traveling to the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring (August 13–15), the Charles Theatre in Baltimore (August 20–22), and — on a shared final weekend, August 27–29 — the Byrd Theatre in Richmond and the Naro Expanded Cinema in Norfolk.

All five stops present the complete slate of winners: Primavera (Audience Award, Best Feature), The Essence of Eva (Audience Award, Best Documentary), Diya (Ted Pedas Award), Happy Birthday (Arabian Sights Award), and Everybody to Kenmure Street (Justice Matters Award). The Avalon stop includes a Q&A with members of Eva Cassidy's DC-area band following the August 8 screening of The Essence of Eva.

Full tour schedule →

Full lineup announced: 32 features in two sections

Everybody to Kenmure Street (Felipe Bustos Sierra, UK) — the festival's Closing Night film. Courtesy of the filmmakers.

WASHINGTON, DC — The Washington Summer Film Festival today unveiled the complete lineup of its first edition, held this July at Regal Gallery Place, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, and The Wharf: thirty-two features in two sections. The festival's public screenings present the five Filmfest DC 2026 award winners; the twenty-seven new selections are official selection nominees, competing for the festival's awards, presented at the Closing Night ceremony on August 1.

The themed section, Light of Peace, pairs the five feature-film award winners of Filmfest DC 2026 with twelve nominated selections drawn from the past two years of festival cinema — among them the Syrian drama The Broken Cross, Kateryna Gornostai's Timestamp, Rithy Panh's Meeting with Pol Pot, and Jesse Moss & Tony Gerber's Washington-set War Game.

The Global Panorama, the festival's open section, nominates fifteen features from 2024–2025 chosen purely on merit — nine American independents, including Ghostlight, Eephus, and Dìdi, alongside six international selections from Canada, Ireland, Iran, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Iceland.

"War is loud, but most of what these seventeen films record is quiet: a debt repaid, an object returned, a street that refuses to empty. We wanted the first section this festival ever programs to be about the distance between conflict and repair — and the people who walk it." — Shirin Ghareeb, Deputy Director & Head of Programming

The opening ceremony will be held between July 28 and 30 — exact date to be announced — with Primavera, Damiano Michieletto's tale of a virtuoso violinist in Vivaldi's Venice, which Filmfest DC audiences voted Best Feature this spring, as the opening film. Closing Night, Saturday, August 1, presents the awards ceremony followed by Felipe Bustos Sierra's Everybody to Kenmure Street and the panel discussion "Neighbors: Civic Peace in Practice" with local community organizers.

Two free outdoor screenings at The Wharf's Transit Pier — The Essence of Eva and Primavera, dates to be announced — continue Filmfest DC's springtime tradition of free waterfront cinema.

See the full Light of Peace lineup →

Filmfest DC launches a summer satellite festival

The Essence of Eva (Alex Fegan & Malcolm Willis, Ireland), Audience Award winner for Best Documentary, screens free at The Wharf — date to be announced.

WASHINGTON, DC — Fresh off its 40th annual festival — 40 years, 3,620 films, 144 countries, one amazing festival — the Washington, DC International Film Festival (Filmfest DC) announced today that it will launch a satellite event this summer: the Washington Summer Film Festival, a festival of feature films opening in late July 2026, with its opening ceremony to be held between July 28 and 30 and its awards ceremony on Closing Night, August 1.

Where the April festival surveys the breadth of world cinema, the summer edition is built around a single curated conversation. Its inaugural section, War & Peace, brings this year's Filmfest DC award winners back to Washington screens and sets them alongside twelve features from the past two years of international cinema.

"Every April we say goodbye to films that deserve a longer life in this city. The summer festival is our answer — a smaller, sharper program that lets Washington audiences sit with one big question for a long summer weekend, and then sends the award winners out on the road." — Tony Gittens, Founder and Festival Director, Filmfest DC

The festival will use three venues: Regal Gallery Place and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library downtown, and free outdoor screenings at The Wharf's Transit Pier on the Southwest Waterfront — all locations familiar to Filmfest DC audiences from the spring festival.

An accompanying Award Winners Tour will carry the five award-winning features to independent cinemas in Washington, Silver Spring, Baltimore, Richmond, and Norfolk from early August through late August.

The Filmfest DC 2026 Awards went to…

Happy Birthday (Sarah Goher, Egypt), winner of the Arabian Sights Award. Courtesy of Filmfest DC.

Filmfest DC successfully wrapped its 40th annual festival this week. As announced on Closing Night, the feature-film awards — whose winners form the backbone of this summer's Light of Peace section — went to:

Audience Award, Best Feature: Primavera, Damiano Michieletto (Italy, France)
Audience Award, Best Documentary: The Essence of Eva, Alex Fegan & Malcolm Willis (Ireland)
Ted Pedas Award: Diya, Achille Ronaimou (Chad, France, Germany, Ivory Coast)
Arabian Sights Award: Happy Birthday, Sarah Goher (Egypt)
Justice Matters Award: Everybody to Kenmure Street, Felipe Bustos Sierra (UK)

The Ted Pedas Award jury consisted of Felix Angel, former curator at the Inter-American Development Bank; Peggy Parsons, film curator emerita; and Karen Thomas, producer/director of Film Odyssey. The Justice Matters jury consisted of Nan Aron, founding president of Alliance for Justice; filmmaker and producer Judy Hallet; and Conrad Martin, executive director of the Stewart R. Mott Foundation. Filmfest DC thanks the CrossCurrents Foundation for its support of the Justice Matters series.

Read more at filmfestdc.org →