New/Next '25: Wow, Everyone's Here!

A dispatch from the 2025 edition of Baltimore's New/Next Festival, including favorite performances and a new favorite film.

When I arrived at New/Next on Friday evening, I immediately saw friends and acquaintances. And the next thing I saw was a cake penis. By that point, the cake was missing its testicles, and a woman was agonizing over whether to eat some or preserve the shaft. “I can’t just cut off the tip,” she said.

Michael Bernieri with his cake penis.

The cake was brought to the festival lounge — housed in the Baltimore Improv Group theater, next door to the main festival site, the Charles Theater — by the team behind The Deliveryboy, Michael Bernieri’s short about a grieving stoner who returns to his hometown and has an encounter with an old acquaintance. The Deliveryboy was set to play at 9:10, as a prelude to Alex Philipps’s new feature Anything That Moves. In terms of strategies to woo festivalgoers into screenings, the cake cock was the biggest… eh, never mind.

I’d driven down to Baltimore straight from a New York Film Festival press & industry screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother (a film about which I will say… Tom Waits!). I love NYFF’s P&I screenings because they’re fairly lax and simple to navigate — and also, of course, because it’s always a primo collection of films. But New/Next was a whole ‘nother level of lax and simple. All the screenings take place at the Charles Theater, and the weekend is pretty much one long hang at the theater, the lounge, and the sidewalk between the two. If you have an all-access pass (which the festival graciously granted me), you’re supposed to reserve tickets to different screenings ahead of time. But I was amazed — and delighted — at how easy it was to be spontaneous. Several times, I was scheduled to see one film, only for friends to convince me I should really see this other film — and I was able to get in without a problem. Pretty much the opposite experience of Tribeca.

Photo Credit: David LaMason

The last time I saw so many people from within what you might call ~the scene~ in one place was probably the closing night of Life World 1.0. I either knew or recognized what seemed like half the crowd. And there was a lot of cast and crew overlap amongst the 100+ films. By my count, David Brown made the most appearances (four), followed by Brian Fiddyment, Colin Burgess, Anna Seregina, and Al Warren (each with three¹). (If I missed someone or miscounted, I’m sorry!)

I only caught a small fraction of the slate, but there were clear through lines connecting what I did see — it was scuzzy, playful, offbeat, absurd, and crude (in both senses); there were several plot lines involving open relationships; a lot of characters were young… unless they were old… and everyone was a little weird (complementary). The vibe of the films — and the festival itself — was not so much antagonistic towards what’s mainstream as it was indifferent. For the most part, these are films made for minuscule budgets, by people with a lot of ideas and energy and pure, childlike passion for making movies. Huzzah!

What I did see varied in quality, but each film offered some things to appreciate. Most frequently, what stood out to me was the performances. NoBudge mainstays like Fiddyment and Seregina were funny as ever in their various appearances. But I was thrilled that a lot of my favorite performances came from actors whose work I wasn’t familiar with previously.