29th Annual Dances With Film: LA Film Festival Comes Alive

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Thursday, 11 June 2026 14:49

Written by Brad Balfour

Yale

With a slate of 279 films, the 29th Annual Dances With Film: LA Film Festival returns to Los Angeles June 18 to the 29th. Held at the TCL Chinese Theatre, DWF will have 144 World Premiere films with 36 feature-length (narrative and documentary) premieres, four North American premieres, and countless more in the shorts and pilots sections. DWF runs the gamut from tender family dramas to mind-bending adventures.

The opening night film is the world premiere of Jay Silverman’s Yale with Caitlin McGee, Kevin Dunn, and Rachael Harris. Yale is based on a true story about a troubled woman who must confront her deadbeat father who abandoned her as a child as the last ditch effort to find a donor kidney for her dying son. The closing night feature is Tender from director Adam Hoezel. Tender is a darkly intimate portrait of marriage under pressure, where love, money, and survival blur into something unrecognizable. 

Dances With Films’ critically acclaimed Midnight section of films including the following features making their North American premieres: Tristan Barr’s Deathkeeper pits a reclusive angel against a charming demon in disguise in order to save a possessed woman. Mason Howard’s U A P takes place during a Fourth of July reunion, where five friends discover a mysterious sphere that draws the attention of government forces and private interests, and is possibly manipulating humanity itself. Making its world premiere is Stephen McNamee’s Muffled, where two true crime enthusiasts return to their hometown to solve the mystery of what happened to their childhood friend, who had vanished without a trace.

Documentaries at DWF include Cam Lui, and Michael Schnee’s Better Call Babs which places the audience in Babs Fry's iconic van for a ride along, witnessing her Red-Cross award-winning work of recovering lost pets and rehabilitating feral dogs, but through the personal challenges that shaped the woman she is today. Rob Arthur’s Frampton traces Peter Frampton’s rise to global rock and roll fame, the struggles that tested his identity and resilience, and his relentless reinvention.

Dances With Film began in 1998 with the intention of creating a film festival for artists and filmmakers not born into Hollywood royalty, giving a voice to independent creators and giving a start to future film legends. 

To learn more, go to: https://danceswithfilms.com/

Dances With Films
June 18 - 28, 2026

TCL Chinese Theatre
Ovation Hollywood

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