Humanities News, Features, and Other Updates

New Kanwal Rekhi Documentary Headlines the 41 North Film Festival

Stickied

The 41 North Film Festival returns to Michigan Technological University November 5–8 with four days of independent films, conversations and special events. All festival events are free and open to the public. Most screenings take place at the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, with two additional films presented by Michigan Tech Student Film Board in Fisher 135.

We are honored to open this year’s festival with a new documentary about Michigan Tech alumnus, benefactor, and tech entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi. Rekhi—for whom Kanwal and Ann Rekhi Hall is named—has been a tireless supporter of Michigan Tech, developing and funding a number of initiatives to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation among Michigan Tech students and alumni. Breaking the Code follows Rekhi’s journey from India to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and on to Silicon Valley. The film will screen Thursday, November 5, at 7:30 p.m. Rekhi will attend the screening, and his son, filmmaker Ben Rekhi, will join him via Zoom for a discussion following the film.

Directed by Ben Rekhi and Swetlana, Breaking the Code traces Rekhi’s rise through an industry that offered few opportunities to Indian immigrants. He became the first Indian to take a venture-backed company public and helped open doors for generations of entrepreneurs. But what began as a biography became a more intimate film about Ben’s parents, their life across cultures, and the sacrifices behind his father’s success. As unexpected events reshape the family’s lives during filming, Ben’s effort to understand his father becomes a search to understand himself.

Fork in the Road, Friday, November 6, at 7:30 p.m., follows farmers working to sustain their land and livelihoods, from a Kentucky family farm to an Indigenous kelp farmer in Alaska and Latina farmers in California. Grounded in the work and ideas of Wendell Berry, the film explores the choices that shape our food systems. Come early for a mini–farmers market in the lobby, featuring local farmers and producers.

Co-director and executive producer Vivian Sorenson, an award-winning filmmaker and television producer whose credits include Chopped, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and La Pitchoune: Cooking in France, will attend the screening and participate in a discussion following the film.

On Saturday, November 7, at 7:30 p.m., Penny Lane’s Wild Inside tells the story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl whose escape from the Central Park Zoo captivated New Yorkers. His unexpected life in the city opens questions about freedom, captivity and our relationships with other animals. A panel Q&A follows with David Flaspohler, dean of the College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, and Michael Paul Nelson, chair of the Department of Humanities and professor of environmental ethics and philosophy.

For lighter fare, The History of Concrete, Friday at 5 p.m., follows filmmaker John Wilson’s wry, wandering investigation of the ubiquitous material and the civilization built with it. Cookie Queens, Saturday at 2 p.m., takes viewers behind Girl Scout cookie season, following four girls and their families as ambition, competition and growing up meet an $800 million business.

Saturday also brings Carl Sagan: We Are Made of Star Stuff at 4:30 p.m. With access to Sagan’s personal archive, director Nanette Burstein looks beyond the celebrated astronomer and television personality to the relationships, curiosity and questions that shaped his life.

Sunday begins at 12:30 p.m. with Luke Lorentzen’s contemplative Boatbuilders, observing the skilled workers of a Maine boatyard as they construct a wooden sailboat over four seasons. At 2:30 p.m., Runa Simi follows a father and son in Peru working to dub The Lion King into Quechua. A discussion with MTU alum Niigaanii Kalvin Hartwig following the screening will explore Indigenous language preservation and connections with efforts to sustain Anishinaabemowin in our region.

At 5 p.m., Joybubbles introduces Joe Engressia, who discovered as a child that he could manipulate the telephone network by whistling the right frequency. Born blind, he found in the telephone an opening to a wider world and helped launch the “phone phreak” subculture that influenced early hackers. The film will be presented with open audio description and open captions.

The festival closes Sunday at 7 p.m. with Everybody to Kenmure Street, a vivid account of a Glasgow neighborhood coming together to stop the deportation of two residents. Told through multiple perspectives, the film captures the uncertainty, determination and unexpected joy of collective action.

Michigan Tech Film Board will present The Peril at Pincer Point, about a hapless sound recordist whose pursuit of the perfect sounds draws him into a mysterious island’s nautical prophecy, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, a darkly comic story of two conspiracy-obsessed men who abduct a CEO they believe is an alien. Both films screen Friday and Saturday in Fisher 135.

The Peril at Pincer Point. Two men in period costume play cards aboard a ship in a black-and-white film scene.

Three shorts programs—Terms and Conditions, The Kids Are Alright and Winter Is Coming—round out the lineup, along with special guests and events and live music in the Rozsa lobby.

For the full schedule, film descriptions and event updates, visit 41northfilmfest.mtu.edu. Contact: Erin Smith at ersmith@mtu.edu

RTC Research Forum: “Performing George Grossmight: Three Generations of Humor from the Lecture Hall to the Cabaret” Laura Kasson Fiss

Published October 9, 2026

By Samantha Canevez

What:

The RTC Research Forum, formerly known as the RTC Brown Bag, is a colloquium series sponsored by the Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture graduate program in the Michigan Tech Department of Humanities. Each month, faculty and students in the program present research on a wide range of topics. The forum offers an opportunity for colleagues and peers to discuss current research, prepare for formal conference presentations, and for students to receive feedback on presentation practices.

Abstract:
The best-known George Grossmith (1847-1912) sang Gilbert and Sullivan’s patter songs and wrote The Diary of a Nobody. His contributions to Victorian performance went far beyond these well-known roles in the performance and print circulation of his comic songs and sketches. Furthermore, his father (1821-1880) and son (1874-1935), also named George Grossmith, each found fame as professional comic performers. Taken together, these three Georges provide a window into the social world of humorous performance from the stage—which the first George rejected—to the lecture hall and back. As they navigated antitheatrical prejudice and maintained a class standing in the upper middle classes, the Grossmiths projected sociable personas. The drawing room and the dressing room blurred as GGIII invited royalty to his dressing room and GGI and II performed “drawing-room entertainments” for the paying public. From Sunday-school rooms to the stage of the Gaiety Theatre to private drawing-rooms, the Grossmiths provided sociable humor.

Who:

Presented by Laura Kasson Fiss, Associate Teaching Professor in Humanities

Dr. Laura Kasson Fiss has an interdisciplinary background in music, literary studies and history of the book. She currently pursues research in both nineteenth-century media and current higher education. One question ties together these strands of research: How can we make exclusive spaces more inclusive?

Victorian Humor

Asking not only “why is this funny” but also “what do you need to know to get this joke,” Fiss provides a window into Victorian media consumption – she even studies the window as a metaphor for the page. Her articles address Victorian humor from Charles Dickens to Lewis Carroll and beyond. Her first book, The Idler’s Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P.G. Wodehouse (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), explores the club as a metaphor for literary sociability in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British humor.

Victorian comic song is the focus of Fiss’s second book project, which picks up on her undergraduate research and first publication on Gilbert and Sullivan. This project looks at three generations of comic performers named George Grossmith and through them the role of the comic man on stage, in the drawing room, and in print.

When:

Friday, October 16, 2026

12pm-1pm

Where:

Petersen Library (318), Walker Arts & Humanities Center

All are welcome to attend!

RTC Research Forum: “Life Before Death: Reframing Reproductive Ethics in the Bioethics Classroom” Trish Grosse Brewer

Published September 14, 2026

By Samantha Canevez

Colloquium Series

Life Before Death: Reframing Reproductive Ethics in the Bioethics Classroom, Trish Grosse Brewer.
Graphic for a talk about pregnancy ethics discourse in the undergraduate ethics classroom.

What:

Abstract:

Although pregnancy provides the context for many of biomedical ethics’ most enduring controversies, it is often treated primarily as the backdrop for debates about abortion, assisted reproduction, and genetic testing rather than as a morally significant experience in its own right. While most courses devote substantial attention to abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, and genetics, pregnancy is often treated merely as the setting for these debates rather than as a morally significant experience deserving sustained ethical inquiry. Miscarriage and stillbirth, if discussed at all, are usually only discussed through the lens of abortion debates. The order in which we teach reproductive ethics shapes students’ ethical imagination.

This paper offers a transferable curricular model for instructors seeking to broaden how reproductive ethics is taught in their biomedical ethics and medical humanities classrooms through a four-week instructional unit. This unit, “Pregnancy, Life, and Death,” has been developed for undergraduate biomedical ethics courses and begins not with abortion or reproductive technology, but with pregnancy and miscarriage. The opening week introduces pregnancy as a unique bioethical state by examining maternal morbidity and mortality, the ethical significance of the maternal-fetal relationship, informed consent during pregnancy, and the challenges of caring for what clinicians often describe as the maternal-fetal dyad. Students then explore miscarriage and stillbirth through patient narratives and clinical case studies, considering questions of grief, uncertainty, personhood, compassionate care, and justice. In the next three weeks, students move on to the more traditional topics of reproductive technologies, euthanasia, and abortion.

Rather than advancing a new theory of reproductive ethics, this presentation argues that how we sequence topics in the biomedical ethics classroom shapes how students understand them. Beginning with pregnancy rather than with contested moral questions invites students to encounter reproductive ethics first through the lived realities of embodiment, vulnerability, dependence, and care. Only then do they engage the more familiar legal and political debates that dominate public discourse. By centering the lived experience of pregnant people before engaging the more familiar legal and political debates surrounding reproduction, educators can cultivate greater empathy, intellectual humility, and ethical nuance in their students.

Who:

Presented by Trish Grosse Brewer, Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy, Department of Humanities

Trish Grosse Brewer is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Michigan Technological University, where she teaches courses in ethics, biomedical ethics, logic, and introductory philosophy. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from Villanova University in 2017 with a dissertation titled Embodied Love and Extended Desire. Her research interests include biomedical ethics, Early Christian moral philosophy (especially that of Augustine of Hippo), and the philosophy of love and sex. Her most recent publication is a chapter in Augustine and the Frontiers of Pluralism: “Dominating Grief: An Ambiguously Augustinian Approach to Pregnancy Loss.” She has five cats.

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, September 25, 2026

12pm-1pm

Where:

Petersen Library (318), Walker Arts & Humanities Center

RTC Research Forum: “Creative Work in Progress”, HU Faculty & Graduate Students

Published September 14, 2026

By Samantha Canevez

Colloquium Series

What:

Join us for a dynamic literary session, as creative writers from the Humanities Department share recent poetry and prose, either published or in progress.

Who:

Presented by:

M. Bartley Seigel, Professor of Humanities & Director of the Michigan Tech Writing Center

Claire Helakoski, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Writing Studies & Assistant Director of the Michigan Tech Writing Center

Jenni Nance, Assistant Teaching Professor of Humanities & Humanities Academic Advisor

Mark Lounibos, Assistant Teaching Professor of Humanities

Ana W. Miigwan, MS, Rhetoric Theory, and Culture ’26

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, February 20, 2026

Where:

Petersen Library (Walker 318), Walker Arts & Humanities Center

RTC Research Forum: “The Border Is Everywhere: Phenomenological Reflections on Space, Agency, and Democracy” Scott Maratto

Published September 14, 2026

By Samantha Canevez

Colloquium Series

What:

Abstract:

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to predictions of an increasingly borderless world, or at least to one with fewer border fortifications. In fact, the opposite has happened. Where there were fifteen border walls along international boundaries in 1989, there are over seventy today, with many more planned or under construction. Border fortifications are many nations’ largest infrastructure investments in the twenty-first century. And whereas borders were once understood to mark edges between sovereign nation states, borders today are better understood as diffuse sets of functions, including securitization, interdiction, and surveillance. As philosopher Étienne Balibar has noted, borders have moved from the edges to the very centers of political spaces, including cities far from any international border. Henri Lefebvre famously observed that “there is a politics of space because space is political.” Drawing on phenomenologies of embodied and political agency, I argue that the new global border regime signals a new politics of space, new logics of sovereignty and citizenship, and an unprecedented threat to democratic agency.

Who:

Presented by Scott Marratto, Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Humanities

Scott Marratto is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan Technological University. He is President of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy and author of The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity (State University of New York Press, 2012). He is also co-author (with Lawrence E. Schmidt) of The End of Ethics in a Technological Society (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). Challenging a prevalent modern idea of the self as, essentially, a discrete, interior consciousness, Marratto has argued that self-consciousness emerges on the basis of the living, expressive movement by which our bodies are situated in a world with others. Beginning from this insight into the nature of self-consciousness and cognition, he critically evaluates neoliberal thinking about selfhood, agency, and choice, and proposes new ways of thinking about the spatial and material conditions of political community and human development.

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, February 13, 2026

Where:

Petersen Library (Walker 318), Walker Arts & Humanities Center

RTC Research Forum: “GENtrified Anthropological Illusionaries” Briana Bettin

Published September 14, 2026

By Samantha Canevez

Colloquium Series

What:

The RTC Research Forum returns Friday, January 30, 2026 at noon in the Petersen Library with GEN-AI: GENtrified Anthropological Illusionaries, presented by Briana Bettin of Computer Science and Psychology and Human Factors at MTU!

Abstract:
Gentrification impacts a wide array of neighborhoods and communities within our analog world. While the same physical impacts may not be present, our computationally connected digital world may not be so different. In this talk, the aesthetics, process, and impacts of physical gentrification will begin to be critically compared and metaphorically mapped to aspects of Internet history, web communities, and application developments. Through this lens, we will further explore the current state of generative artificial intelligence (“gen-ai”), and the ways these software artifacts presently contribute to re-producing and re-presenting gentrification.

We hope you will join us for this highly anticipated talk, and for the exciting presentations we have scheduled for February and beyond!

Who:

Presented by Briana Bettin, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Psychology and Human Factors at MTU.

Briana Bettin’s research blends user experience methodologies with education research to better understand programming students and the impacts of the classroom environment. Her research interests span education, experiential design, and human factors.

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, January 30, 2026

Where:

Petersen Library, Walker Arts & Humanities Center

RTC Research Forum: “Rediscovering Ownership and Agency: Shifting from Private to Public Performance” Lior Rosenfeld

Published November 20, 2025

By Samantha Canevez

Colloquium Series

What:

Abstract:

The claims made by technology companies regarding the advancement of autonomous machines raise significant concerns about their implications for democratic governance. A machine that is capable of independent thought and action poses a potential threat to democratic judicial and political systems, as it undermines the autonomy of the people. Drawing on phenomenological insights, I will first clarify why some of these concerns may be misplaced by emphasizing that autonomy must be achieved rather than presupposed. I will then argue that the recent deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems highlights that ownership and agency are constituted through public speaking rather than being intrinsically tied to autonomy or self-rule. While the former gives the power to begin anew, the latter is marked by territoriality, exploitation, and coercion.

An autonomous entity supposedly possesses an identity, always returns to itself since it thinks—calculates the world independently of social-political engagements. As such, it remains unaffected by contingency, allowing it to justify its beliefs and actions through established rules. Additionally, autonomy presupposes agency, as a self-ruling entity is necessarily the cause of its own actions. And as Jacques Derrida explains, since the people in a democracy are autonomous or self-rulers, they have the force to determine the law (Derrida, 2025, p.13). In contrast, in our liberal tradition, which dates back to John Locke, democratic citizens are seen as individuals or natural entities, and therefore free from legal constraints. This freedom grants them the right to own property and other natural rights, empowering them to resist any claims of ownership made by authorities. However, with the rise of AI systems, individuals in democratic nations are increasingly losing their natural rights. The reduction of experience to thinking—calculating across all sectors by AI systems violates individual rights, for instance, by scraping texts without the authors’ consent. Moreover, due to the widespread use of AI systems, nation-states can no longer effectively protect copyrights. As Derrida argues in the context of cloning, techno- scientific reason undermines today its foundation—the nation-state, which is responsible for distributing rights and protecting the dignity of its citizens (Derrida, 2005, p. 146).

The deployment of AI systems increasingly blurs the distinctions between nation-states and private technology companies. This phenomenon indicates a potential erosion of the nation-state’s power in contemporary governance and social organization. Nevertheless, the support that nation-states extend to technology companies developing artificial intelligence systems that exploit and oppress their citizens is not merely a historical phenomenon; rather, it reflects an intrinsic characteristic of any entity that claims autonomy. As the political writings of Derrida and Hannah Arendt illustrate, autonomy is constituted by private performances within the household, which can therefore be authoritative, ethnic, and exploitative. However, Derrida’s deconstruction of democracy illustrates that citizens can achieve democratic autonomy by responding to the imperative of justice and, thereby, superseding familial, natural, and irrational laws.

According to Derrida, the conflict between the rule of law and freedom within modern democracy is irreconcilable. The question of what a democratic citizen is — whether a subject of the law or a free individual — remains undecided. This undecidability allows citizens to face one another, constituting an ultra-political experience. Within this pluralistic and uncertain realm of meaning, complete autonomy—independence from contingency is unattainable. As a result, the concept of equality under the law, the meaning of justice in a democracy, turns unfounded, uncovering justice as fundamental. Since justice cannot be ruled, justice calls democratic citizens to rule, thereby achieving autonomy.

However, claims for justice lack the necessary political power to effectively resist an AI regime. According to Arendt, public speaking or public performances enact intersubjective political experiences which are fundamental to selfhood and agency, and therefore the meaning of the power of the demos. Public speaking is non-territorial, allowing citizens to appear before others unconditionally and to act uniquely. Moreover, since public performances are contextual, the self always appears anew, simultaneously generating the past and the future. The temporality of shared existence, which Arendt refers to as natality, constitutes the process of narration, calling to keep a record. Thus, public performance is agonistic—pluralistic, giving rise to new senses of self and agency, in contrast to private performance, which constitutes self-mastery and, therefore, is antagonistic—divisive.

Who:

Presented by RTC PhD canditate Lior Rosenfeld.

Lior Rosenfeld obtained an M.A. in Philosophy from the New School in 2020. Currently, Lior is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate at Michigan Technological University. In his research, Lior investigates how the phenomenological description of the life-world alleviates the tension between democracy and science as illustrated by contemporary examples such as climate change denial and vaccine skepticism.

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, December 5, 2025

Where:

Petersen Library, Walker Arts & Humanities Center

RTC Research Forum: “Language and Artificial Understanding: Stress Tests for the Uniqueness of Human Intelligence” Ronald Klingler

Published November 20, 2025

By Samantha Canevez

Colloquium Series

What:

Abstract:

This essay concerns contributions made by David Braine in Language and Human Understanding (2014) and their bearing on contemporary discussions of artificial intelligence. The first is his proposal that human linguistic capacity has the shape of sense as understood by James J Gibson, where senses must be understood in their relation to the organism as a whole, and that organism must be understood in relation to its environment. The second is his understanding of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s famous line that “language makes infinite use of finite means,” where he takes the infinity to mean indefinite, contrary to the more common recursive interpretation. These contribute to a third regarding malleability and the brain, where its plasticity reaches such an extent that pragmatics and semantics begin to determine, rather than be determined by, neurological structures. Braine takes this malleability to be distinctively human. From the view of 2014, he argued “it will still never be possible for the statements of linguistic science to enable one to calculate or compute the linguistically public significance or sense of the utterances we make” (149). Here I assume Braine’s three contributions, but put pressure on his proposition of computational-impossibility in light of the advances in artificial intelligence in the years since. From the view of today, Braine’s account of malleability reads as anticipatory of LLMs. I argue that the primary intuition-pump he uses to explain malleability cannot differentiate what’s distinctly human from contemporary machine learning attempts. I question whether it matters whether the significance is computable, or if probabilistic attempts can approximate said significance to an arbitrary degree; I argue Braine’s view can defend against this. I also consider advancements in embodied and multimodal reasoning, and whether they can imitate the environmentally oriented nature of speech in Braine’s proposal; I consider this the strongest possibility for defending the uniqueness of language.

Who:

Presented by RTC PhD student Ronald Klingler.

Ronald Klingler is a PhD student in the Rhetoric, Theory, & Culture program. He considers the positions around the uniqueness of human language use, and evaluates them in light of recent advances in artificial intelligence.

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, October 24, 2025

Where:

Petersen Library, Walker Arts & Humanities Center

RTC Research Forum: “Vital Necroscenes: Internet Memes as Visual Tools for Environmentalism” Samantha Stein-Brevitz

Published November 20, 2025

By Samantha Canevez

Colloquium Series

What:

Abstract:

Understanding how we can approach environmentalism from a humanities perspective calls for an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses not only our place in the world but everything’s place in the world—human and non-human. There is no question about the cruciality of a comprehensively ethical and conscious means of interacting with the planet. There have been multiple attempts and approaches to a better method to the human ways of existing on this planet. Recognizing how to course correct is easier said than done, however. This concept is large and, in and of itself, sublime. The visual analysis offered in this work will specifically work to break down and interpret common, widespread Internet meme formats, thus presenting how they can evoke a need for environmentalism in daily life. The pieces guiding my research are the “This is fine” dog as well as a variant of another common Internet meme, Spiderman(s) pointing at himself. Though these works are ambiguous and can be used in multiple contexts, the power of their messages can be used to approach a call for better environmentalism. Additionally, it reiterates the very real threat of contemporary climate disasters which can thus be used to reexamine the power and vitality expressed within these Internet memes. Guiding my definition and understanding of the vital necroscene, I specifically connect Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement with Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter as well as Jill H. Casid’s “Necrolandscaping”. Both Kant, Casid, and Bennett emphasize the limitlessness in life and in death. Additionally, Kant writes about the judgment that is assigned to Nature. Nature, he insists, is viewed as this aimless mechanism—though it should not be that way. Taking this notion of purposiveness, I connect it directly to the attempts made by vital materialism and the necroscene to dismantle and trouble the black/white binary of life. The goal of vital materialism is to present the purposiveness within non-human phenomena. Further, these concepts connect to demonstrate that Nature is an assemblage of multiple and boundless human and non-human actants—to borrow from Bruno Latour. The presented research aims to demonstrate ways Internet memes can evoke a vital necroscenic approach, creating more awareness for the call to environmental humanities. In understanding the vitality of Internet memes, we can develop an understanding and potentially even an increased appreciation for the interconnectedness of both human and non-human lives.

Who:

Presented by RTC PhD student Samantha Stein-Brevitz.

Samantha’s research aims to explore the connections between Internet memes and the necrocene that is the death of the planet. Through humor, Internet memes serve as a communication tool to emphasize the vital need to recognize and act on planetary crises and assist in dismantling Nature vs Human. In an effort to evoke change, the images presented show the irony that “this is fine” and life goes on.

All are welcome to attend!

When:

Friday, September 19, 2025

Where:

Venue changed to Petersen Library, Walker Arts & Humanities Center

Dive Deep at the 41 North Film Festival, November 6-9, 2025

Published October 7, 2025

By Erin Smith

deep sea organism seen in documentary How Deep Is Your Love at the 41 North Film Festival

This year’s 41 North Film Festival invites audiences to engage with a slate of over 20 creative and thought-provoking films that explore the complexities of contemporary life—from the depths of the natural world to the heights of human resilience. The festival features a diverse lineup of acclaimed and emerging filmmakers whose work takes up urgent social questions through compassionate, sometimes fierce, and always artful storytelling. Panels and guests will offer context and perspectives on many of the films. The festival will be held November 6-9 in the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, with additional films screening in Fisher 135 in partnership with MTU Film Board. All films are free and open to the public. Donations and volunteers are appreciated and welcome.

Folktales documentary at the 41 North Film Festival

The festival opens Thursday, 11/6, with Folktales (Ewing/Grady, 2025), which follows teenagers at a Norwegian folk school in the Arctic as they navigate the path to adulthood (with a little help from each other and their sled dogs). Balancing the generational scales is Cat Town, USA (Napolitino, 2025), the story of an elderly couple who run a retirement home for senior cats (Friday, 11/7).

Bradley Garrett in Underland at the 41 North Film Festival

Our featured presentation on Friday evening is Underland (Petit, 2025), loosely based on Robert Macfarlane’s bestseller of the same name. A poetic meditation on what lies beneath the earth, the film weaves together three stories of underground exploration. A discussion with featured social geographer and urban explorer, Dr. Bradley Garrett, will follow.

On Saturday, 11/8, How Deep Is Your Love (Mortimer, 2025) takes us on a voyage with scientists who study and catalog deep-sea species in ocean territories that may soon be mined. In the evening, the festival presents Natchez (Herbert, 2025), which examines questions of historic preservation in a town defined by and dependent on its conflicted antebellum past.

Adaptive Mountain Bikers in Best Day Ever at the 41 North Film Festival

Sunday afternoon, 11/9, the rocky terrain of disability advocacy and accessibility is traversed by two films. Best Day Ever (Knight/Berne, 2025) highlights adaptive mountain biking, and the lessons learned when a Vermont community builds an adaptive mountain biking trail system. Following is Reid Davenport’s new film, Life After, which examines the implications of Medical Aid In Dying (MAID) legislation for disabled people, who may suffer pressure to end their lives rather than receive the necessary support to live them.

The festival’s final two films take us back to the animal kingdom with Flow (Zilbalodis, 2024), the Oscar-winning animated feature. This lyrical and hypnotic film tells a completely wordless story about a cat who must work with other species to survive a great flood. Closing out the festival on Sunday evening is the hilarious and educational documentary, Listers: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching (Reiser, 2025).

Albert Birney in OBEX at the 41 North Film Festival

Film Board will partner again with the festival and screen two films in Fisher 135: Rian Johnson’s 2006 neo-noir film, Brick, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and OBEX (Birney, 2025), a fantasy film set in pre-Internet 1987, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last January.

Sponsored by the department of humanities, the department of visual and performing arts, the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, and the College of Sciences and Arts. For more information, check the festival website or contact Erin Smith, ersmith@mtu.edu.

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