How the Santa Fe Film Festival Became a Home for Indigenous and International Cinema

“They call Santa Fe the Land of Enchantment,” says actor Gary Farmer (1996’s Dead Man, FX’s Reservation Dogs), advisory board chair and founding member of the Santa Fe International Film Festival, now in its 18th year. “But we call it the land of entrapment.”

Santa Fe and the surrounding area do seem to captivate a certain kind of creative person. Over the decades, it has attracted artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and Bruce Nauman, musicians like Ottmar Liebert and Dave Grusin and writers like Cormac McCarthy and Tony Hillerman.

Then there are the actors and filmmakers. Farmer, who helped establish SFiFF in 2009 alongside artistic director Jacques Paisner and executive director Liesette Bailey, has lived in Santa Fe since he shot 1989’s Powwow Highway. Since then, other SFiFF advisory board members have settled there as well, including writer-producer Kirk Ellis (Apple TV’s Franklin), director-writer Chris Eyre (AMC’s Dark Winds) and Wes Studi (1992’s Last of the Mohicans, 2025’s Avatar: Fire and Ash), who in 2019 became the first Native American actor to be honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Like Farmer, Studi was one of SFiFF’s earliest supporters, and in the nearly two decades since its founding, he has watched the festival flourish.

“We were there at the very beginning of it all, with Jacques and Liesette” when the festival focused on “alternative” film, Studi recalls. The festival “began to grow with their own experience over the years,” and today “as far as I’m concerned, it’s the fastest-growing film festival institution that there is.”

Now an essential venue for Indigenous voices and a destination for international cinema, SFiFF receives more than 7,000 submissions and programs roughly 70 features and 100 shorts. It draws 15,000 visitors annually to Santa Fe, a city with just shy of 100,000 residents. Some of those are invariably filmmakers who end up staying, becoming part of the region’s historically strong production community and helping SFiFF grow.

“Some people come here and show a movie and then they scout for their next movie. Sometimes they buy a house here,” Paisner says. “Then it gives this real wealth of moviemakers and actors that are living and working here a chance to have a place to be on a panel or bring in a movie that they were in somewhere else and have a discussion about it. Then for the young filmmakers coming up here from the film schools, it gives a lot of them a chance to play their first short film at a festival.”

SFiFF became Oscar-qualifying for narrative, live-action and animated shorts in 2024, a major milestone for the fest that intensified the competition. “It was something we worked toward for quite some time,” Paisner notes.

Its biggest milestone so far? “Last season, we had 13 different Oscar nominations for films that came out of the fest,” Paisner says, “which is huge for any festival and a significant jump from the previous year.”

But the festival’s first major shift came about in 2022, when the event dropped its independent-film affiliation and officially changed its name from the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival to the Santa Fe International Film Festival.

“By about 2014, we were looking at almost as many or more international films than U.S. films,” Paisner recalls. “And then in about 2021, it increased even more, and we were looking at more international films than U.S. films.”

“We went from independent to international especially when [the Telluride Film Festival] skipped the boat on them and wanted to do more American film, which made sense for that successful festival,” Farmer adds. “So we just stepped right in.”

That shift in identity quickly became a defining strength.

“We’ve got an audience that’s really hungry to see new films and international films,” Paisner says. “So when I see something in Cannes like Fjord, I’m thinking, ‘OK, they are going to go crazy over this,’ because it’s an audience that really wants to be challenged, that wants to see something different, that will line up for a big Hollywood movie. But sometimes the strange movie that’s playing up against it will be just as popular or nearly as popular. And that’s why it’s the Santa Fe International Film Festival.”

This year, Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord (Neon), Romania’s official entry in the Oscars’ best international feature competition, is screening out of competition, along with South Korea’s official Oscar submission, Possible Love (Netflix) from Lee Chang-dong. There’s also Searchlight’s 1970s-set CIA action-comedy Wild Horse Nine from Martin McDonagh, Focus Features’ Elsinore with Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman and Alex Gibney’s eagerly anticipated documentary Musk. James Gray’s mafia tale Paper Tiger (Neon) will close the festival on Oct. 19.

Opening the festival on Oct. 14 is the dramedy In Memoriam, featuring comedian Marc Maron in his first feature-film star turn.

A native New Mexican, Maron grew up in next-door Albuquerque. He remembers being in high school and making the hourlong drive north to Santa Fe for his first job, shuttling merchandise between outposts of a regional clothing store called Alan’s Apparel on hot summer afternoons.

“I do think there is something magical about northern New Mexico in general. There’s something about the sky out there, and certainly in between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Once you go up the hill a little bit, those mesas have a totally unique vibe,” Maron says. “The magic of New Mexico is there if you let it in, and depending where you grew up there, it kind of informs who you are.”

From writer-director Rob Burnett, former executive producer and head writer of The Late Show With David Letterman, In Memoriam follows Maron’s Langston Stanfield, a narcissistic actor who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and becomes obsessed with ensuring he’ll be included in the Academy Awards’ “In Memoriam” montage. But he doesn’t have the résumé for it, so he decides to “work a bunch of different angles,” Maron explains, to try to make it in. (Letterman makes a cameo attesting to his worthiness.) Along the way, he develops a relationship with his estranged daughter, played by Talia Ryder.

“It’s really a story about a pathologically self-centered guy that doesn’t know what’s important in life and, you know, might find it,” says Maron, who also produced the film.

Playing Maron’s therapist in the film is Lily Gladstone, who became the first Native American woman to be nominated for the best actress Oscar, for 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

It’s a nice note of serendipity for a festival that has centered Native and Indigenous actors and filmmakers since its inception.

SFiFF counts the Institute of American Indian Arts as a longtime sponsor, and the IAIA also sponsors the festival’s Indigenous Film Program, curated by the Ontario-born Farmer, a member of the Cayuga Nation from the Six Nations of the Grand River. A longtime advocate of Indigenous voices in media, he established the program when he helped get SFiFF off the ground in 2009.

“I do whatever I can to ensure that Indigenous people’s voices are heard,” Farmer says, noting that the program is open to Native and Indigenous filmmakers from around the world.

This year’s Indigenous slate includes Ceremony, a documentary feature about the impact of colonization on the Nuxalk people of British Columbia’s Bella Coola region, from director Banchi Hanuse, whose Aitamaako’tamisskapi Natosi: Before the Sun received the festival’s special jury award for a documentary feature in 2024.

“You got a strong first film, you got a better second film, right?” says Farmer. “I just love nurturing young filmmakers into positives and having an impact on the world cinematically. It’s great.”

Among this year’s Indigenous shorts are Sila, from Ciril Jazbec and Lucia Flores, a coming-of-age story filmed in the Greenlandic language; from the Philippines, Jewel Maranan’s Remigia’s Lessons, which follows an elder of the Dumagat tribe as the land and the world change around her; and Mirumiru (Bubble), Allan George’s animated portrait of a loving Maori couple dealing with dementia.

Films screening in competition this year include director Marine Atlan’s buzzy La Gradiva, about a group of French students on a school trip to Naples; Catherine Hardwicke’s Street Smart, about a group of kids living on the street in Venice Beach, California; and Cody Lighting’s Smudge the Blades, which follows an Indigenous youth hockey team and features Reservation Dogs’ First Nations star Paulina Alexis.

Another Dogs alum will make a splash at this year’s festival: visionary award recipient Zahn McClarnon, who played the show’s dreamy, warmhearted tribal police officer Big. But of McClarnon’s many film and TV credits, the one that has pushed his career to the next level is that of Lt. Joe Leaphorn on creator Graham Roland’s hit series Dark Winds, which shoots in and around Santa Fe and on the nearby Tesuque Pueblo.

McClarnon will receive the award at the Lensic on Oct. 16, followed by a screening of his directorial debut, episode two of the most recent season of Winds — titled “Bikéé’ Doo Éédahoozįįdę́ę́góó (Toward Their Unknown Paths)” — as the prize is meant to honor “a director or an actor who we think has a great vision,” Paisner says, “but also has a bright future.”

But McClarnon isn’t the only one taking home an award this year. While last year’s event saw Ali McGraw present journalist Amy Goodman with an icon award, and actor and activist Edward James Olmos receive a lifetime achievement award, this Oct. 17 at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, the lifetime achievement award will go to famed actress, singer and activist Pam Grier.

“I’m always fighting for the women,” Farmer says, lauding Grier’s long career portraying strong female characters.

Additionally, SFiFF will showcase some of those roles with a retrospective of her most iconic films: 1973’s Coffy, 1974’s Foxy Brown and 1997’s Jackie Brown.

That intentional curation — from Indigenous works from around the globe to Grier’s blaxploitation classics — isn’t incidental. It’s a kind of cultural counterprogramming Maron sees as increasingly significant.

“That is the pace and defining kind of momentum of our time, where everything gets plowed under, and [there’s] churn and AI slop and shouting and influencers and debating and garbage,” Maron says. “If there is a sort of quieter place to unfold these things that require a certain type of attention, and a certain type of assessment in relation to all that other shit, it’s important and it’s radical. And it shouldn’t be radical. It should just be what is. It should be just something we all embrace, but you know, in these times, it attains a different level of importance.”