The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is proud to be a venue for the 25th Annual deadCenter Film Festival! As Oklahoma’s largest and only Oscar©-qualifying film festival, deadCenter is the best place to see exciting new shorts, insightful documentaries, hilarious comedies, hair-raising thrillers, and the very best independent films from around the world and all over Oklahoma.
See the list below for the lineup of deadCenter titles screening in OKCMOA’s Noble Theater.
To learn more about deadCenter, view the full festival schedule or purchase a pass, visit: https://dcff.eventive.org/welcome
67 Bombs to Enid — Thursday, June 12 at 7 pm
Dir. by Ty McMahan and Kevin Ford | 2024 | 88 min. | In English | Documentary Feature | World Premiere
From Executive Producer Errol Morris, 67 Bombs to Enid is an intimate, character-driven documentary about survivors of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands who relocated to rural America. The film presents intimate access to characters with first-hand accounts of bomb blasts and their descendants who speak to the generational impact these perverse weapons of war have had on humans.
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Life’s Ballet — Friday, June 13 at 5:15 pm
Dir. by Wendy Garrett and Christopher Hunt | 2025 | 57 min. | In English | Documentary Feature | World Premiere
Life’s Ballet is an intimate documentary that explores the transformative power of guidance and artistic leadership through the story of Jo Rowan, a legendary dance educator who built one of the nation’s premier programs. Through archival footage, candid interviews, and vérité moments within her home, the film reveals Jo’s unwavering commitment to shaping not just dancers, but lives. As she prepares to step away from the school she built, Life’s Ballet reflects on the enduring influence of a teacher’s hand. We witness her poignant journey of letting go, tracing the invisible threads that bind educator and student across generations. It is a meditation on legacy, purpose, and the profound, often unseen, artistry of teaching.
Free Leonard Peltier— Friday, June 13 at 8 pm
Dir. by Jesse Short Bull and David France | 2025 | 124 min. | In English | Documentary Feature | Oklahoma Premiere
Directed by Jesse Short Bull (Lakota Nation vs. the United States) and David France (How to Survive a Plague, The Death and Life of Maarsha P. Johnson, and Welcome to Chechnya), and produced by Bird Runningwater. Leonard Peltier, one of the surviving leaders of the American Indian Movement, has been in prison for 50 years following a contentious conviction. A new generation of Native activists is committed to winning his freedom before he dies.
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Documentary Shorts — Saturday, June 14 at 4:30 pm
In honor of deadCenter’s first year of the Oscar®-qualifying category Best Documentary Short, this program highlights some of the phenomenal short documentaries featured in our 2025 festival.
The Snip | Dir. by Alain Delannoy | 10 min. | Canadian men examine their own masculinity and belief systems through their experience of vasectomies in this short documentary on what makes a man.
Idle Warriors | Dir. by Molly Stark-Ragsdale | 19 min. | In New York City, it’s illegal to idle a vehicle for more than three minutes. But for fifty years, it went unenforced. In 2018, City Council passed a law allowing any person to file a complaint against idling commercial vehicles and collect 25% of the $350 ticket. A small group of detail-oriented people file 90% of the complaints. They call themselves Idle Warriors and will stop at nothing to capture their video, even if it means getting into an altercation with a driver. Idle Warriors dives into the motivations that drive these environmental bounty hunters as they track tailpipe exhaust while unpacking broader questions around health, the environment, and citizen enforcement.
WASKA: The Forest Is My Family | Dir. by Nina Gualinga, Daniel Boloh Miranda and Elizabeth Swanson | 15 min. | As commodification and extractivism in the Amazon Rainforest extends to the plant medicine hayakwaska, the granddaughter of a Yachak (shaman) reveals the essence of what it means to live as part of the forest. Nina Gualinga of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku speaks with the memory of her Apayaya (grandfather) about the ongoing cultural appropriation, environmental destruction, and marginalization of Indigenous Peoples, questioning our very relationship to earth and the quest for healing.
Institution | Dir. by Jonathan Wysocki | 3 min. | In this experimental documentary, filmmaker Jonathan Wysocki interweaves personal and historical audiovisual elements to raise questions about the past, present, and future of American institutions. Visually, the film juxtaposes Super 8mm footage from two eras: Wysocki’s parents’ “traditional” straight wedding in 1970 and his own “non-traditional” queer marriage in 2018. Aurally, it combines 1970 audio from the Apollo 13 mission with a Republican representative’s fervent opposition to the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022. Through commentary and contradiction, the media amalgam contemplates the notion of “tradition” and “progress” within American institutions, which appear fixed to some but fluid to others.
Welcome Home Freckles | Dir. by Huiju Park | 26 min. | After four years away, Huiju returns home to South Korea. Exchanges with her loved ones are awkward and clumsy. Huiju turns once again to her familiar rituals: pruning the trees, preparing a sauce, tying a braid.
Tiger | Dir. by Loren Waters | 13 min. | Dana Tiger was just five years old when her father, legendary Muscogee Creek artist Jerome Tiger, passed away. She turned to his art as a way to know him, the richness of her culture, and the bounty of her family’s artistic tradition. In memory of Jerome’s art and to support their family, Dana’s mother and uncle started a booming t-shirt printing business in the 1980s. Then, tragedy struck their family once more. Dana’s younger brother, Chris Tiger, was relentlessly murdered and their business was brought to a halt. Dana and her family have been working for nearly 30 years to revitalize the iconic Tiger t-shirt company, through immense grief and suffering from Parkinson’s. Now, everybody wants their hands on a Tiger T-shirt.
Entre le feu et le clair de lune (Between the fire and the moonlight) | Dir. by Dominic Yarabe | 18 min. | The filmmaker’s father recounts the 10 days he spent hiding as a young boy during a war in his village in West Africa. Together, father and daughter set out to continue the book he never finished about his memory of the events quietly buried by the Ivorian government. With the help of the children living in his village today, the three generations create a mythical tapestry of entwining timelines, nightmares, and memories.
A Rare Grand Alignment — Saturday, June 14 at 8 pm
Dir. by Cinqué Lee | 2024 | 93 min. | In English, Finnish and Norwegian | Narrative Feature
In the winter of 1982, three American boys find themselves stranded in a cable car with a dead body, suspended midair in the mountains of Norway during a rare celestial event.
Drowned Land — Sunday, June 15 at 2 pm
Dir. by Colleen Thurston | 2024 | 86 min. | In English | Documentary Feature | Oklahoma Premiere
Deep in the Choctaw Nation of rural Oklahoma rages a fight to preserve the Kiamichi River, reckoning with a cycle of land loss for the Indigenous diaspora and the community at large.
Assembly — Sunday, June 15 at 5 pm
Dir. by Rashaad Newsome and Johnny Symons | 2025 | 99 min. | In English, Japanese, Polish and Portuguese | Documentary Feature
Visionary artist Rashaad Newsome merges art, AI, and performance to create a multimedia tribute to vogueing and Black queer culture. Invited to stage a show at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, he reclaims the space from its white military past, transforming it into a Black queer utopia. Joined by global collaborators and Being – an AI ‘digital griot’ – Newsome’s creative journey unfolds in this immersive documentary. Through striking visuals and storytelling, the film celebrates community, resilience, and the power of art to heal, unite, and spark liberation.
